2012 Digital Presidential Election Coverage

01/31/2013 - Technori: Harper Reed on Obama for America 01/28/2013 - Wired: Q&A: Dylan Richard, Director of Engineering, Obama for America 01/20/2013 - Obama Legacy Report 12/20/2012 - EngageDC: Inside The Cave 12/18/2012 - AdWeek: Here's One Advertiser Who Swears Mobile Ads Work: Obama 12/18/2012 - Huffington Post: What's Next for Obama For America's Data and Technology? 12/17/2012 - Technology Review: How President Obamas campaign used big data to rally individual voters, Part 3 12/17/2012 - Read Write Web: How Obama Knew How You'd Vote, Even Before You Did 12/17/2012 - Technology Review: How President Obamas campaign used big data to rally individual voters, Part 2 12/16/2012 - Technology Review: How President Obamas campaign used big data to rally individual voters, Part 1 12/12/2012 - Kyle Rush: Optimization at the Obama campaign: a/b testing 12/10/2012 - Ad Age: Election Embeds: Facebook, Google Got Cozy With Campaigns 12/08/2012 - GigaOm: How Obamas data scientists built a volunteer army on Facebook 12/07/2012 - NY Mag: Noble Nerds 12/07/2012 - WSJ: Obamas Campaign Used Salesforce.com To Gauge Feelings of Core Voters 12/07/2012 - Commentary: Is The GOP Digital Team (Still) In Denial? 12/06/2012 - PDF: From Hope To Forward | Ethan Roeder 12/06/2012 - PDF: From Hope To Forward | Catherine Bracy 12/06/2012 - PDF: From Hope To Forward | Teddy Goff 12/06/2012 - PDF: From Hope To Forward | Betsy Hoover 12/05/2012 - Obama Digital Org 12/05/2012 - Triangulation: Harper Reed Interview 12/05/2012 - CNN: Gut Check Moffatt and Bleeker Interview 12/05/2012 - National Journal: Obama, Romney Digital Advisers Talk Shop 12/05/2012 - The Hill: Romney's Digital Director Talks Lessons Learned 12/05/2012 - CNN: Early Vote Central To Digital Campaign 12/05/2012 - Business Insider: Michigan Supreme Court Judge Says Facebook Campaign Won Her Election 12/04/2012 - Ad Age: Michigan Supreme Court Campaign Credits Facebook Ads With Margin of Victory 12/04/2012 - New Media Rockstars: Obama's Social Media Strategist Talks To NMR About Being The Voice Of The President 12/03/2012 - Slate: "The Socially Awkward Do It Better" 12/03/2012 - TechPresident: How Analytics Made Obama's Campaign Communications More Efficient 12/03/2012 - The Atlantic: Data Vs Gurus: Democrats Say Metrics Are Eclipsing The Consultant Class 12/01/2012 - Commentary Magazine: The GOP's Broken Machine 11/30/2012 - Braceland: My Experience Leading the Obama Campaigns Tech Field Office 11/30/2012 - The Atlantic: The Social-Network Effect That is Helping Legalize Gay Marriage 11/30/2012 - Tech President: Obamas Targeted GOTV on Facebook Reached 5 Million Voters, Goff Says 11/29/2012 - ProPublica: Everything We Know (So Far) About Obama's Big Data Tactics 11/29/2012 - Bloomberg Businessweek: The Science Behind Those Obama Campaign E-Mails 11/27/2012 - Tech President: Alan Grayson Shares His Thanksgiving Wal-Mart Escapade on Facebook and YouTube 11/26/2012 - nettuts: Chatting with Obama For Americas Director of Frontend Development: Daniel Ryan

11/22/2012 - NJ.com: How I won an election by only using Facebook 11/21/2012 - POLITICO: Jim Messina at the Politico Playbook Breakfast 11/21/2012 - POLITICO: Jim Messina: What I learned in the election 11/20/2012 - Washington Post: Democrats Push to Redeploy Obamas Voter Database 11/20/2012 - Time: Friended: How the Obama Campaign Connected with Young Voters 11/20/2012 - ArsTechnica: How Team Obama's Tech Efficiency Left Romney IT In Dust 11/19/2012 - Tech President: How Obama for America made its Facebook friends into effective advocates 11/19/2012 - The Daily Beast: The story behind the most viral photo ever 11/16/2012 - National Journal: How Obamas Tech Team Helped Win the Election 11/16/2012 - The Atlantic: When the nerds go marching in 11/16/2012 - TPM: Facebooks election 2012 roundup: big bird, binders full of women won big 11/16/2012 - Technology Review: How Facebook Boosted Obama's Vote Tally 11/16/2012 - Gawker: How The Obama Campaign's Data-Miners Knew What You Watched On TV 11/15/2012 - MotherJones: Under the Hood of Team Obama's Tech Operation 11/15/2012 - TIME: Exclusive: Obamas 2012 digital fundraising outperformed 2008 11/14/2012 - ARS Technica: Built to win: Deep inside Obama's campaign tech 11/14/2012 - Washington Post: Obama Campaign Took Unorthodox Approach To Ad Buying 11/13/2012 - Los Angeles Times: Obama Campaign's Investment In Data Crunching Paid Off 11/12/2012 - Gigaom: How Obamas tech team helped deliver the 2012 election 11/11/2012 - Tech Crunch: Premature Facebook Election Hype: A Response to the Atlantic 11/09/2012 - All Facebook: Did Facebook engagement translate to wins in key congressional races 11/08/2012 - The Atlantic: Did Facebook give democrats the upper hand? 11/08/2012 - Politico: The Facebook bump 11/07/2012 - TIME: Inside the secret world of the data crunchers who helped Obama win 11/07/2012 - CNet: The post-election tech tally: winners and losers 11/07/2012 - FREEP: Voters document election on social media 11/07/2012 - TechPresident: For Romney's Digital Campaign, A Second-Place Finish 11/06/2012 - Slate: I Voted: Facebook Stories Shows Women Outvoting Men 2 to 1 11/06/2012 - WSJ: Election day plays out on Twitter and Facebook 11/06/2012 - Tech Crunch: Click Facebooks Im Voting button, research shows it boots turnout 11/06/2012 - POLITICO: Study: Facebook, Twitter Users Divulge Votes Online 11/06/2012 - Naked Security: US Election Voting Booth Hoax Spreads on Facebook 11/05/2012 - The Atlantic: Obamas Facebook Fans Love Michelle; Romneys Love Winning 11/05/2012 - CNN: Microtargeting: How Campaigns Know You Better Than You Know Yourself 11/05/2012 - CNN: Election Takes Over American Conversation on Facebook 11/05/2012 - CNET: Facebook Wants You To Vote 11/03/2012 - Hemet Press-Enterprise: Will Facebook Factor in Tuesdays City Council Election? 11/02/2012 - WSJ: How Facebook, Twitter Court Political Campaigns 11/02/2012 - Technology Review: How Facebooks Plans Could Affect the Election 11/01/2012 - Boston.com: Some Facebook Users Dislike Being Used in Online Advertising for Mitt Romney 10/31/2012 - Forbes: Why do Obama Supporters Appear in Facebook Ads as Romney Fans? 10/31/2012 - BuzzFeed: Facebook Lets People Talk Politics, But May Not Get Out the Vote 10/28/2012 - Tech Crunch: The Prop 37 Phenomenon on Facebook 10/27/2012 - Washington Post: Binders Full of Women Romney quip goes viral 10/26/2012 - Mashable: Presidential Candidates Urge Voters to Get On Facebook 10/25/2012 - Mashable: Super PAC Wants to Put You in Its Facebook Ad 10/25/2012 - POLITICO: Presidential Election 2012: Can Romney Close the Digital Divide? 10/22/2012 - Tech President: Why Campaigns Are Happy Your Vote Isnt as Private as Many Think It Is

10/22/2012 - SFGate: Social Media Battle: Obama Engages More Voters Despite Aggressive Romney Debate Strategy 10/22/2012 - POLITICO: Obama Campaign Now Targeting Specific Individuals 10/22/2012 - Tech Crunch: Romneys New Facebook App Knows Which Friends Are Most Influential 10/19/2012 - Huffington Post: Politics in the Social Media Age: Insights from Joe Lockhart 10/17/2012 - Washington Post: Why Facebook Campaign Ads Are a Suckers Bet 10/17/2012 - Mashable: Second presidential debate: less Twitter, more Facebook 10/18/2012 - The Guardian: Koch-Based Activists Use Power Of Data In Bid To Oust Obama From White House 10/14/2012 - Forbes: Social Networking, Facebook and the Vote 10/13/2012 - USA Today: Political Spats on Facebook Spill Into Real Life 10/13/2012 - New York Times: Campaigns Mine Personal Lives to Get Out Vote 10/10/2012 - Mother Jones: Mitt Romney Probably Didnt Hack Your Facebook Page 10/08/2012 - POLITICO: Obama Campaign Pushes Voter Registration on Facebook 10/08/2012 - Honolulu Civil Beat: Hawaii Campaigning in the 21st Century 10/07/2012 - New York Times: Campaigns Use Social Media to Lure in Younger Voters 10/04/2012 - Fox News: Social media weighs in on 2012 presidential debate 10/02/2012 - Mashable: Social is the Secret Weapon in Local Politics 10/02/2012 - Technology Review: The Real Debate Will Take Place on Facebook and Twitter 10/02/2012 - Mother Jones: Inside the Obama Campaigns Hard Drive 10/02/2012 - MotherJones: Meet Obama's Digital Gurus 10/02/2012 - Slate: Advertising on Facebook: Its Finally Good for Winning Votes 10/01/2012 - All Facebook: Paul Ryan Finds Winning Facebook Formula as Campaign Strategists Name Favorite Features 09/28/2012 - Mashable: Behind the Social Media Campaigns of Obama and Romney 09/27/2012 - Connecticut Senate: McMahon Campaign Facebook Game Urges Murphy to Release Documents 09/24/2012 - Hartford Courant: Social Media: Candidates Nationwide for Various Political Posts are Using Social Media as a Campaign Tool 09/23/2012 - Arizona Daily Star: Candidates Cast Their Nets on Facebook, Twitter, but Woo Factor is Thought Slight 09/19/2012 - Forbes: Is Romney More Social Media Savvy Than Obama? 09/13/2012 - Wired: Social Media Really Does Rock the Vote 09/12/2012 - SF Gate: Romney campaign: biggest user of Facebooks mobile ad platform 09/12/2012 - Tech Crunch: Mitt Romneys digital director Zac Moffatt: you cant run a political campaign without digital 09/12/2012 - Tech Crunch: Important study: Facebook quadruples the power of campaign messages 09/11/2012 - Campaigns & Elections: A Social Media-Fueled Upset 09/11/2012 - PandoDaily: Rally.coms Donations Data Shows Us Americas Stingiest States 09/11/2012 - All Facebook: How Facebook propelled U.S. Senate Candidate Ted Cruz to Primary Win 09/08/2012 - POLITICO: Tech Firms Snafus Snarl Conventions 09/07/2012 - All Facebook: Obama Supporters Flock to Facebook During Acceptance Speech 09/07/2012 - PBS MediaShift: Mediatwits #55: Twitter, Facebook Rule DNC; Amazons Big Week 09/07/2012 - PandoDaily: The Biggest Tech Themes of the Democratic National Convention 09/07/2012 - PandoDaily: Startups Get Political: How Engine Advocacy is Bridging Washington and the Valley 09/07/2012 - BuzzFeed: The Democratic Convention by the Facebook Numbers 09/07/2012 - CNN: 5 OMG Moments at the DNC 09/07/2012 - CNN: CNNs Gut Check for September 7, 2012

09/07/2012 - CNN: Obama Outshines MTVs Music Awards on Facebook 09/07/2012 - Campaigns & Elections: Cementing Social Medias Place in the Campaign Worlds 09/07/2012 - Tech Crunch: Underdog no more: how Romneys digital director, Zac Moffatt, got silicon valley power the campaign 09/06/2012 - All Facebook: Obama Bests Romney in Facebook Mentions During Both Conventions 09/06/2012 - All Facebook: Facebook Abuzz After Ex-President Bill Clintons Nomination Speech at DNC 09/06/2012 - PandoDaily: WordPress Staffer Petitions Dems to Enlist Betty White as Obamas Opening Act 09/06/2012 - The Hill: Clinton beat by NFL on TV But Won in Facebook Conversations 09/06/2012 - POLITICO: Silicon Valley Stars Are a No-Show in Charlotte 09/06/2012 - CNET: Obama Facebook Apps Lets Users Show Theyre Watching the DNC 09/06/2012 - CNN: On Facebook, Clintons Speech More Popular than NFL Kickoff Game 09/05/2012 - All Facebook: Facebook Highlights Democratic App Developers at DNC 09/05/2012 - Charlotte Magazine: Inside Facebook and Google at the DNC 09/05/2012 - PandoDaily: Pull Up a Chair and Enjoy the Twitter Election 09/05/2012 - San Francisco Chronicle: Social Media Has Key Role in 12 Election 09/05/2012 - Bloomberg Businessweek: Twitter Deputizes Masses of Political Pundits at Conventions 09/05/2012 - National Journal: Obama App Links Facebook Friends to Voter Lists 09/05/2012 - CNN: 2012 Conventions Live Blog 09/04/2012 - Guardian: Obama Campaign Manager Jim Messina Puts Faith in Online Organising 09/03/2012 - PandoDaily: Yep, Were at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, NC 09/03/2012 - CBS News: How to Follow the 2012 Republican National Convention on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ 09/02/2012 - Tech Crunch: Do Women Love Ann Romney? Only Facebook Knows 09/02/2012 - Fox: Romney campaign claims to be closing gap in social media battle 09/01/2012 - CNN: RNC Nets Higher Buzz Factor Than Hurricane Isaac, Facebook Talk Meter Shows 08/31/2012 - Associated Press: In the Digital Age, Is There Room for the Campaign Button 08/31/2012 - BuzzFeed: Obama Responds to Eastwood: This Seats Taken 08/31/2012 - Newsday: Barack Obamas Facebook Photo Responds to Clint Eastwoods Empty Chair 08/31/2012 - Huffington Post: Can Facebook Call the Election? 08/31/2012 - Mashable: Google, Facebook and Twitters friendly rivalry at GOP2012 08/30/2012 - Tech President: At Republican National Convention, Romneys Digital Director Hints at New App 08/30/2012 - All Facebook: Facebook Highlights GOP-Flavored Apps Over Drinks at Republican Convention 08/30/2012 - Talking Points Memo: Facebook Promotes Political Apps 08/30/2012 - Voice of America: Live from Tampa! Sort Of 08/30/2012 - The Hill: Facebook Lets Users Tag Themselves in Convention Panorama 08/30/2012 - POLITICO: Tech Branding Is All Over Tampa Fete 08/30/2012 - CNN: CNNs Gut Check for August 30, 2012 08/29/2012 - Houston Chronicle: On Social Media, Obama Has Many More Followers, But Romney Team Says GOP Wins on Quality 08/29/2012 - Reuters: TV Audiences Go Social as Republican Convention Coverage Wanes 08/29/2012 - CNN: CNNs Gut Check for August 29, 2012 08/29/2012 - CNN: Romney Gaining Buzz Among Women on Facebook 08/28/2012 - CNN: On the Trail: August 28, 2012 CNN Political Ticker 08/28/2012 - Mashable: Facebook at the RNC: Politicians finally get us 08/28/2012 - Politico: Social media staged at conventions? 08/28/2012 - PC Magazine: Facebook and CNN team up to offer real-time election trending site 08/28/2012 - Inside Facebook: Does Romney Have a Better Facebook Strategy Than Obama?

08/28/2012 - All Facebook: Facebook, Romneys Strategist Sound Off on Panel at GOP Convention 08/27/2012 - Ad Age: Team Romneys Digital Chief: Engagement Trumps Raw Numbers in Social Media 08/27/2012 - The Hill: GOP, Dem Conventions Battle to Claim Social Media Supremacy 08/27/2012 - The Hill: Romney Digital Director: User Engagement on Social Media Trumps Quantity of Followers 08/27/2012 - The Hill: Facebook, Twitter Provide Real-Time Insight From Political Conventions 08/27/2012 - CNN: Facebook, CNN Unveil Election Insights 08/27/2012 - CNN: CNNs Social Media Guide to the Conventions 08/27/2012 - CNN: On Facebook, Campaigns Show the Power of a Post 08/25/2012 - Terra: How Social Media is Changing the Way Politicians Gather Information 08/24/2012 - FOX (Tampa Bay): In One Room, Social Media Titans Gather for DNC 08/24/2012 - Bloomberg Businessweek: Univision plans presidential forum with Obama, Romney 08/23/2012 - Red Alert Politics: Advice for First Time RNC Attendees 08/23/2012 - New York Times: Debates denied, Univision turns to candidate forums 08/22/2012 - Bloomberg BusinessWeek: Everything Changing for Campaign Coverage 08/22/2012 - National Journal: How Mitt Romney Goes Digital 08/21/2012 - The Hill: Ted Cruz wins social media victory 08/20/2012 - Lost Remote: Inside Look at CNN and Facebooks First Election Analysis 08/17/2012 - Huffington Post: 2012 Conventions Embrace Social Media Openness 08/17/2012 - POLITICO: Republicans Plan a Tech-Heavy Convention 08/16/2012 - POLITICO: Technology Giants to Descend on Conventions 08/16/2012 - Buzzfeed: For a Social Republican Convention, Website is Second 08/16/2012 - Charlotte Magazine: Facebook to Offer Apps & Drinks, Co-Host Innovation Nation, and More at RNC and DNC 08/16/2012 - National Journal: Facebook Rolls Out Convention Plans 08/16/2012 - Buzzfeed: Obama, Not Romney, Is Winning the Social Media Race 08/16/2012 - All Facebook: What does Facebook have in store for the Republican, Democratic conventions? 08/16/2012 - BuzzFeed: Romney, Not Obama, Is Winning The Social Media Race 08/15/2012 - Charlotte Observer: Facebook for Business in 4 Steps 08/15/2012 - Mashable: Paul Ryan Helping Romney Unseat Obama from Digital Throne 08/14/2012 - CNN: Ryan Knocks Obama Off Perch as Most Talked About on Facebook 08/13/2012 - WebProNews: Who is Paul Ryan? Lets Check His Facebook Page 08/13/2012 - Forbes: Obama vs. Romney: Winning the War of Social Engagement 08/13/2012 - All Facebook: Republican VP Nominee Paul Ryan No Stranger to Facebook 08/12/2012 - USA Today: Running for the Presidency, Youd Better Be on Social Media 08/11/2012 - POLITICO: Paul Ryan VP Pick Adds Social Media Muscle 08/09/2012 - POLITICO: Mitt Romney Makes Most of VP App 08/08/2012 - Fox News: New Facebook Tool May Turn Friends into Enemies 08/07/2012 Washington Post: Introducing the Issue Engine 08/07/2012 - St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Missourians Declare Political Support on Facebook with Brunner in Lead 08/06/2012 - Venture Beat: The 2012 Election: Where Big Data Meets Politics 07/31/2012 - Politico: Ted Cruzs secret: mastering social media 07/24/2012 - ClickZ: Democratic Firm Ties Voter Data to Facebook Friends 07/20/2012 - Technology Review: Facebook: The Real Presidential Swing State 07/19/2012 - MediaPost: Why the Race for the White House Goes Through Facebook 07/18/2012 - Wisconsin Reporter: Romney Campaign Battling for States Youth Vote 07/18/2012 - PR News: Election 2012: Sizing Up the Social Media Battle

07/17/2012 - Seattle Times: Wash. To Unveil Voter Registration on Facebook 07/17/2012 - Slate: The Romney Campaign's Data Strategy 07/14/2012 - POLITICO: The Duo Inside the Facebook War Room 07/13/2012 - Washington Post: Romney Advisers, Aiming to Pop Obamas Digital Balloon, Pump Up Online Campaign 07/12/2012 - PBS: An Election on Facebook: Old Media Enters the New World 07/09/2012 - All Facebook: CNN, Facebook announce several initiatives for 2012 Presidential Election 07/06/2012 - The Hill: Romney Camp Offers Facebook Supporters Merchandise Deal 07/02/2012 - The Atlantic: A Tour Of The Self-Contained, Design-Happy City of Obamaland 07/02/2012 - ClickZ: Obama Facebook Ads Promote Jobs Act Message 06/18/2012 - Business Insider: Mitt Romney has a new strategy to dominate the Facebook campaign wars 06/14/2012 - Bloomberg Businessweek: Obama's CEO: Jim Messina Has a President to Sell 06/09/2012 - POLITICO: Obamas Data Advantage 06/07/2012 - Huffington Post: Will the Online Campaign Kill the TV Ad? 06/06/2012 - Washington Post: Big Data From Social Media, Elsewhere Take Trend-Watching to a New Level 05/08/2012 - The Atlantic: At Campaign Fundraisers, Obama's Tech Staffers Are The Stars 05/03/2012 - Huffington Post: Barack Obama, Mitt Romney Embrace Social Media to Court Women Voters 05/03/2012 - NPR: That New Friend You Made on Facebook? He Might Be Named Mitt or Barack 05/01/2012 - Los Angeles Times: Republicans expand Facebook efforts with Social Victory Center 05/01/2012 - Mashable: Republicans launch Facebook app to defeat Obama 05/01/2012 - BuzzFeed: Republicans Play Tech Catch-Up 04/30/2012 - Breitbart: RNC to Unveil Social Victory Center for 2012 Online Campaign 04/26/2012 - Alaska Dispatch: Epic Social Media War Expected in Presidential Campaigns 04/20/2012 - CNN: RNC looks to Facebook for political edge 04/09/2012 - Campaigns & Elections: If You Build It, They Might Not Come 04/09/2012 - Helena Independent Record: Hopefuls Embrace Social Media 04/01/2012 - Daily Beast: How a Tweet Can Beat a PAC: Social Media Gives Voters Muscle in Politics 03/30/2012 - Buzzfeed: The Republican Party Wants to Be Your Friend on Facebook 03/29/2012 - Huffington Post: What the 2012 Presidential Candidates Can Learn from Socially Savvy Brands on Facebook 03/28/2012 - The Hill: RNC Emphasizes Social Media in National Convention Plans 03/22/2012 - TechPresident: Obama Campaign Opens Tech Field Office In San Francisco Thursday 03/22/2012 - Human Events: Frontrunners Romney and Obama Intensify Their Social Media Efforts 03/20/2012 - Washington Post: Women Set Rick Perrys Facebook Page on Fire 03/15/2012 - All Facebook: How Mitt Romney Upgraded to Timeline 03/13/2012 - Tech President: Yes They Can: What Voters Have Lost and Campaigns Have Gained from 2008 to 2012 03/11/2012 - POLITICO: SXSW: Techies Look to Redo Campaigns 03/11/2012 - CNN: Gingrich Pins Hopes on Hashtags 03/11/2012 - TechCrunch: Social Super Tuesday How the 2012 Candidates Stacked Up on Facebook 03/10/2012 - Atlanta Journal Constitution: Gingrich Engages His Tweeples on Social Media 03/06/2012 - USA Today: Can Social Media Predict Election Outcomes? 03/02/2012 - All Facebook: Ohio Debuts Facebook Voting App Before Big Election 03/02/2012 - Washington Post: Obama's Birth Certificate Featured on New Facebook Timeline 02/28/2012 - Human Events: Romney Needs to Market Himself on Facebook, Twitter 02/28/2012 - Tech President: How Social Media is Keeping the GOP Primary Going 02/24/2012 MSNBC: Rick Santorum Leads Rivals in Twitter, Facebook Buzz, New Analysis Shows

02/23/2012 - PolicyMic: Barack Obama Campaign Manager Urges Millennials to Use Twitter and Facebook to Win the Social Media War Against Republicans 02/20/2012 - New York Times: Online Data Helping Campaigns Customize Ads 02/18/2012 - Mashable: Whos Winning the Twitter and Facebook Presidential Election 02/17/2012 - The Hill: All Politics is Social 02/17/2012 - Guardian: Obama, Facebook and the Power of Friendship: The 2012 Data Election 02/15/2012 - Slate: Obama's White Whale 02/12/2012 - Forbes: What Mitt Romney Should Do With His Facebook Now 02/03/2012 - POLITICO: Facebook/POLITICO Poll: Florida Results Wont Influence Nevada Voters Decisions 01/30/2012 - Slate: For Sale: Detailed Voter Profiles 01/29/2012 - New York Times: Facebook Users to Put Political Views Up in Lights on Times Square 01/21/2012 - Ad Age: Paul-Affiliated Super PAC Tests Limits of Mostly Digital Campaign 01/20/2012 - Fox News: Republican Candidates Challenge Dem Dominance of Social Media 01/18/2012 - The Atlantic: Doing Digital For Romney: An Interview With Zac Moffatt 01/16/2012 - POLITICO: The 2012 Tech Primary 01/13/2012 - Slate: Project Dreamcatcher 01/13/2012 - POLITICO: Facebook Users Have A Lot to Say on Debates 01/12/2012 - POLITICO: Facebook Primary: Mitt Romney, Ron Paul in the Lead 01/10/2012 - WCSH (Portland): Social Media Throughout the NH Primary 01/09/2012 - All Facebook: Will Facebook Debate Spur a Huntsman Shakeup in NH? 01/05/2012 - Mashable: Facebook, NBC joining forces to host social presidential debate 01/05/2012 - All Facebook: GOP gears up for Sundays NBC News Facebook Debate 01/03/2012 - All Facebook: POLL: Economy is Top Concern for Voters on Facebook 01/03/2012 - Newsmax: From Facebook to Twitter, Candidates Trade Final Jabs on Social Media 01/02/2012 - Daily Beast: Inside President Obamas Reelection Machine 01/01/2012 - Mashable: Republican Candidates Take to the Web in the Battle for Iowa 12/28/2011 - ClickZ: New Pro-Paul Group Pushes Video Shares and Blue Republican Plan 12/28/2011 - New York Times: Republicans Shake More Hands Using Social Media 12/27/2011 - All Facebook: Paul, Gingrich Up on Facebook Prior to Iowa Caucus 12/23/2011 - TechCrunch: Ron Paul is the Second Most Popular Candidate on Facebook (And Hes Gaining) 12/23/2011 - Technology Digital: Barack Obama Becomes More Social for 2012 Campaign 12/22/2011 - Tech President: From YouTube to Facebook, New Digital Targeting Helps Romney Campaign Reach Voters 12/21/2011 - POLITICO: Campaigns Capitalize on Facebook 12/18/2011 - Huffington Post: Michele Bachmann Woos Iowa Voters with Video, Social Media 12/15/2011 - McClatchy: Election 2012 Campaigns Are All Over Facebook 12/14/2011 - Bloomberg: Obama's Re-Election Path May Be Written In Will St. Clair's Code 12/14/2011 - ClickZ: Perry Pushes Iowa Faith Message on Pandora and Facebook 12/13/2011 - Roll Call: Political Campaigning Enters Age of Technology 12/12/2011 - All Facebook: Debates Help Gingrich Catch Up in Facebook Fan Race 12/08/2011 - Washington Post: Campaigns Harness Social Media Graphs for Cash 12/06/2011 - The Hill: Republican Field Woos Cains Facebook Fans 12/05/2011 - ClickZ: Perry Looks to Lasso Cain Supporters with Facebook Ads 12/05/2011 - All Facebook: Gingrichs Facebook Popularity Rises as GOP Race Shifts 12/04/2011 - Des Moines Globe Gazette: Networking New and Old Key to Mobilizing Supporters for Candidates 12/02/2011 - ClickZ: Groups Make Elizabeth Warren Facebook Poster Child 11/30/2011 - POLITICO: New Voting Tech Innovations for 2012

11/28/2011 - All Facebook: Newt Gingrich Turns to Facebook After Endorsement 11/15/2011 - All Facebook: GOP Contender Newt Gingrich Doubles Facebook Fans 11/04/2011 - AdAge: Elections Will Turn on Which Candidates Use Social Sharing Most Effectively 11/03/2011 - Tech President: The Frictionless Grassroots, Part 1 10/13/2011 - Associated Press: Social Media Companies Friend Politics 10/12/2011 - Engage: Tracking the Most Talked About Candidates on Facebook 10/11/2011 - Tech President: Dont Confuse Number of Facebook Fans with Success: Mitt Romney, Herman Cain and Rick Perry 10/10/2011 - Tech President: How Campaigns Use of Facebook Data Might Change the 2012 Election 10/09/2011 - CNN: How Obamas Data-Crunching Prowess May Get Him Re-Elected 09/28/2011 - Huffington Post: Why 2012 Is Shaping Up to Be the Verb Election 09/28/2011 - The Hill: Cain Thanks Facebook Friends in Web Video 09/27/2011 - Old Dominion Watchdog: Kaine, Allen in Social Media Shootout 09/23/2011 - All Facebook: STUDY: Romney is Most Popular Politician on Facebook 09/21/2011 - Bloomberg Businessweek: Facebook and the Like Me election 09/11/2011 - ClickZ: Romney Offers E-Book for Price of a Tweet 08/26/2011 - All Facebook: Rick Perrys Campaign: Facebook is Not a Gimmick 08/25/2011 - Forbes: A Plea to the GOP: Dont Pull a Digital Nixon 08/16/2011 - Tech President: Heres the Dish on Tweeter-Using Texan Rick Perrys Online Presidential Campaign 08/12/2011 - All Facebook: 2012 GOP Hopefuls Descend on Iowa and Facebook 07/24/2011 - Salt Lake Tribune: D.C. Notebook: Huntsman Losing Facebook Primary 07/24/2011 UPI: Politics 2011: Politics Gets Real in the Virtual World of Social Media 07/20/2011 - Huffington Post: Is Facebook the New Iowa? 05/27/2011 - All Facebook: Tim Pawlenty Testing Facebooks Sponsored Stories 04/20/2011 - Washington Post: Facebook, President Obama and the Youth Vote in 2012 04/17/2011 - Huffington Post: Elections 2012: The Social Network, Presidential Campaign Edition 04/08/2011 - The Hill: Cornyn: Lawmakers Having to Conquer Fear of Social Media 04/08/2011 - NPR: Politicians Take to Technology for 2012 04/04/2011 - TechCrunch: Obama's Re-election Campaign Puts Facebook Front And Center Literally 03/31/2011 - All Facebook: STUDY: Millennials Prefer Facebook Politicking 03/21/2011 - Boston.com: Pawlenty accounted presidential exploratory committee 03/21/2011 - Politico: Time Pawlenty forms 2012 presidential exploratory committee

Technori: Harper Reed on Obama for America http://vimeo.com/58592933 January 31, 2013 Wired: Q&A: Dylan Richard, Director of Engineering, Obama for America http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/01/qa-dylan-richard-director-of-engineering-obama-for-america/ By Jake Gardner January 28, 2013 Gathering Clouds: What are your feelings on how the presidential election went? What was the experience like? Dylan Richard: The campaign was the most amazing experience that I could possibly imagine. There was just a staggering amount of work. I was there for 18 months and towards the end, it was 16-20 hour days, seven days a week for the final couple of months. I look at that on paper and think, Wow. Thats an incredible amount of work. And my entire team was doing the same. My overall feeling coming out of the election was that it was worth that and much more the incredible benefit at the end of it is still so staggeringly huge to me. GC: What are your perspectives on what brought your team together for the campaign? DR: What brought everybody together, truly, was President Obama. He is an outstanding, genuine, effective leader that is, frankly, unparalleled in our lifetime. The message that he communicates is the only reason that we were able to bring people together to do this because it absolutely would not be worth it if it werent for him and for the things that hes going to do and everything he has accomplished so far. So that, coupled with really interesting tech challenges and an amazing team, is how we brought together more and more people. GC: What were the tech challenges that were attractive to you? The tech mindset is not one to shy away from a difficult problem; so what was it that motivated you to really dig in beyond just a belief in the overall mission? DR: There are two really interesting challenges: one of which is obvious and the other which is a bit more obscure. The obvious one is just a question of scale. Putting together applications that are going to be used for a presidential campaign means scale like nothing else. There are very few other conditions where we have traffic spikes like during a campaign. Considering some of the graphs and charts that have been available in the media, there were moments of traffic over time where it was steady and at a good pace. During the last week or two, however, it just exploded, as you can imagine. Exponential growth doesnt even properly portray what went down. We had some people volunteering that were ex-Twitter engineers and they kept saying Its not a hockey stick. Its like a right angle looking at the traffic spike. We would go from a pretty solid baseline to more than you have ever imagined, and then that number just continued to increase. So the challenge there, from a technical standpoint, was around being able to build things to cope with that reality, and it was really fun. That challenge in particular was a great recruitment tool in and of itself. The slightly less obvious one is trying to unify data. There had been efforts starting at the end of 2008 and through the 2010 campaign to build more technology in-house, either at Obama for America or at the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and more tools that unify the data in a way that would provide greater insight through an infrastructure that could facilitate that kind of strategy. There are a couple of vendors that we use that have a great deal of data experience, especially in finding ways to pull it all that

together and do a big vendor integration project. That might sound boring, but is actually incredibly complicated and a really fun challenge to do that with vendors and with our own systems. But heres the key part: we had to do it all while the campaign was going on. So, our challenge was to essentially re-factor an entire infrastructure to something that is more scalable, more unified, while everything is already in use. We all internally described it as building an airplane while its mid-flight. GC: What do you understand about how your competition was approaching this challenge? In the end, the Romney camps approach to technology didnt serve them in the same way. What do you understand about what they did vs. what you did, and where do you think they went wrong? DR: I honestly dont know much about what they did in terms of what their strategic decisions were in terms of technology. But Im sure that they worked incredibly hard, and they put in a lot of time and they got to where they thought they needed to be. I can say that it seems that there wasnt as much infrastructure being brought in-house in the same way for the Romney campaign. GC: Contextualize the mindset for your team and the related teams going into this. Why did you choose one technology over another, or one vendor over another? What was the criteria that they had to match specifically with regards to the cloud? DR: There was not really much question. The shape of our curve means that we essentially cant use anything but cloud. We could theoretically do a baseline that is not cloud and use cloud for spikes and do some sort of hybrid arrangement. But the kind of scale that were talking about, there really werent many options, other than Amazon Web Services (AWS), who have been amazing. So, the choice was actually fairly self-evident, in the end. GC: Why AWS? DR: AWS fits our curves in many ways. They provide the ability to have a small footprint when were small and to grow to an enormous footprint very quickly to be fair, we had an enormous footprint. I think that there was an infrastructure diagram that was up at the AWS re:Invent conference that showed an idea of the scale that we were talking about. So, the ability to grow that big is one of the chief benefits Amazon offers. The other thing it provided was the ability to scale our costs. Eighteen months ago, people were not as interested in giving to the Obama campaign as they were three months ago. The nature of the campaign was one of building up to an event that has a curve for not just how much traffic was flowing to the website, but for really everything that we were doing to achieve that crescendo at the end. So being able to have our costs stay low at the beginning and only pay for what we needed was an enormous benefit, especially [on] a budget based in contributions. GC: Beyond that, the benefits youre talking about are really like a poster-child example of the benefits of cloud overall, but what else did the platform enable you to do? What other benefits were you able to reap? DR: We were able to automate a great deal of how we do things. To break it down a little bit, our infrastructure had three different environments. We had our production environment, which was in Amazon and was to actual scale. We had a staging environment that was also in Amazon to do all of our testing and validation of builds, etc. but at a smaller scale; and then we had an internal testing environment. We had the ability to automate all of the releases using Puppet and we had our own AppRepo and did releases that way.

GC: How did you account for redundancy at that scale? Amazon has a track record of breaking down from time to time, just like others cloud vendors. You need to plan for failure to a degree. So, at something of that scale, how do you plan your business continuity? How do you plan your disaster recovery? DR: We were in multiple Availability Zones (AZ) because its silly not to be. Its very easy to be in multiple Availability Zones and paying for two servers as your minimum instead of one. Its a tiny price to pay for that redundancy. Towards the end of the campaign, we were split across three AZs, all in U.S. East. We had it, on an infrastructure level, set up so that if any of those AZs goes out, we would channel over to the others, and nobody would notice because everything was functioning as it was supposed to. If all of U.S. East were to go out which would be catastrophic on many levels, not just for us but for the Internet in general we essentially set up a warm fail-over in U.S. West, particularly as we were getting close to Sandy, as the storm was coming through a week before Election Day. It was the perfect storm, in so many ways. Though, if it had knocked us out for two hours, we would have been in a very bad place. So we set up a read-only infrastructure in U.S. West so that if all of U.S. East were to go out, we could very easily switch over to West. That way, should our worst case scenario come to pass, we could have something up so that all of the people that are working on the campaign (which is, at that point, largely having data to consume and having information that people can use) would be able to do what they need to in support of the effort uninterrupted. Within each of the applications that we wrote, we had different failover levels not only for the applications, but for functions within applications so we could define the core features that were needed for the applications to be functional. We had all of the other features on top of that so if we lost a whole bunch of stuff, we would be okay. Lets say we lost all of our read slaves and we just had the master, and it was only in one AZ because terrible, terrible things have happened at this point (like other AZ failures). We could cut off certain functionalities so that our risk would be exposed to just the most important things at that time. This would give us time to then put all of the application resources in our teams hands to be able to make the necessary changes. GC: Did you have incidents that your business continuity plans effectively worked for?

DR: There were a lot of things where wed had, for instance, an API endpoint that was far more expensive than it needed to be; and this is our own application; and its putting far too much pressure on the database for something that we didnt actually need it to necessarily be using. So the ability to turn off that endpoint was key. If one CPUs pegged at 100 on the database box, all of a sudden everything is slow or failing and we need to quickly mitigate that, as an example. We did make use of that where needed, but I dont think that there was any significant downtime of anything. GC: What other tools were you bringing in to complement AWS, and how were those beneficial to the framing of a successful IT strategy, and for the campaign overall, to achieve your goals? DR: We work with a couple of external vendors that just do political technology. NGP VAN offers a service called VoteBuilder, which is used extensively, and is for all of the volunteers in the field it is what they use to interact with data both to input and to consume largely. So walk packets, call lists and that sort of stuff, as well as a significant portion of online stuff from Blue State Digital. They did a large part of our website forms for petitions, etc. and a bunch of our email and fundraising as well. They had been deeply involved in Democratic technology, most notably from the last election. So we had them in place and integrated their solutions along with all of the things that we were building.

So we built a lot of our functional infrastructure and systems between the two organizations and our own internal teams, as well as developing tools to serve our analytics team, which ended up being a rather large Vertica cluster. We had that in-house (actually colocation) at the DNC on physical hardware, but we had that and we had a fallback cluster for that in AWS. So what we tried to do was to build a bridge between everything, and AWS worked really well for that. Organizing for Action - Obama Legacy Report http://secure.assets.bostatic.com/frontend/projects/legacy/legacy-report.pdf January 20, 2013 EngageDC: Inside The Cave http://engagedc.com/download/Inside%20the%20Cave.pdf December 20, 2012 nettuts: Chatting with Obama For Americas Director of Frontend Development: Daniel Ryan http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/interviews/chatting-with-obama-for-americas-director-of-frontenddevelopment-daniel-ryan/ By Jonathan Cutrell November 26, 2012 Whether you lean to the right or the left, theres little doubt that, if youre a Nettuts+ reader, youll likely agree that technology is rapidly shaping politics. In United States Presidential campaigns, the web was a major platform for front-facing unification of a message, but it was also a core part of each sides internal processes. Recently, we had the opportunity to interview Daniel Ryan the Director of Frontend Development for Obama for America about the strategies, technologies, and experiences that were a part of the race to November 6. Q What was the biggest large-scale challenge for the design and development teams during the campaign? The biggest scale challenge wasnt a single project; it was the sheer volume of requests we got each day. Our dev team was split among three areas: fundraising, persuasion and getting voters to the polls. Turning around new designs through approvals by messaging, policy, research, legal, etc., then launching those projects within a few days or often a few hours was the single largest challenge. Both Design and Dev had a team of Producers who managed those requests, assigned them to relevant staff and saw them through completion. The biggest challenge [...] was the shear volume of requests we got each day. Q How did the campaign approach A/B testing and data-driven design decision-making? One of the things that has been said often about the campaign is that we were data driven. This couldnt be more true. My deputy Kyle Rush oversaw an optimization working group consisting of developers, designers, user experience engineers, data analysts, online ad specialists and content writers. We used a mix of approaches, mostly focused on Optimizely for A/B testing to prove (and disprove, often) theses about how pages could perform better. Our traffic levels meant we could run multiple tests per day to significant levels. A weekly report was compiled with updated best practices and recommendations based on those findings. We estimate that we achieved about $125 million in incremental improvements to our fundraising pages alone.

Q Can you give us a simple run-down of the stack, from back to front? There wasnt a single stack. One of the smartest things we did was run dozens of decoupled systems tied together with JavaScript and Akamai services. Broadly, our stack ran on Amazon Web Services, including thousands of EC2 instances, several large database clusters and S3 hosting. Our main site, www.barackobama.com, was an Expression Engine install backed by EC2 and RDS and fronted by Akamai caching. Akamai offloaded about 98% of all of our traffic. Additionally we used Jekyll, multiple custom apps built on Django, Flask, Rails and Magento. Our widest-used language was Python. One of the smartest things we did was run dozens of decoupled systems tied together with JavaScript and Akamai services. Q What are some of the open-source tools OFA used during the campaign? What was the production/deployment strategy? On the client-side, we rolled our own CSS grid and core styles along with jQuery, Modernizr and a core JavaScript library that lazy loaded modules as needed. We used Mustache.js templates quite a bit for browser-based apps. As the first responsive website for a national campaign, we tried out a lot of open source tools for making mobile experiences better. Fitvids.js was one of the heaviest used. Internally, we worked in LESS CSS, compiled by CodeKit. One of the devs showed me LESS while we were overhauling the site in October 2011; by the end of the day, the whole site had switched to it. This is just one example of how we stayed open to better approaches every day and werent scared to embrace a new method or system if it made sense. We ran git as our VCS of choice, for all the obvious reasons. All of our code went through Github, which also served as our main code management flow. We were heavily guided by the principles of How Github Uses Github to Build Github. Wherever it made sense, our flow was: branch locally set a Git tag on the repo once the code was ready for review and testing deploy the tag to staging servers code review and QA once the code was production ready, set up a pull request to the master branch pull requests were reviewed by lead developers or senior developers; static assets were deployed to S3, while server-side code required a deploy request to our DevOps teamthe DevOps team used Puppet and Gippetto to create apk distros for the Linux boxes small code changes would get deployed on the fly; large ones would get built out under new server clusters, tested internally and then swapped in place of the old version

We didnt get to use this flow everywhere we would have liked, because we came into a working system, rather than starting from scratch. When I arrived in August 2011, there were no dev or staging environments for our main site, for instance. We got a staging system in place pretty quickly, but always struggled to have local dev environments for Expression Engine. Q Where did design ideas originate? What was the process of taking an idea from birth to deployment? Design ideas largely came from the Design team directly. Josh Higgins, our Design Director, and I worked very hard to make sure our teams collaborated continuously. We sat in our own section of the office, along with

the program/project managers, so we could keep the two teams working physically near each other. Many of the designs we rolled out started by a designer or developer finding a cool idea somewhere and emailing it around to the two teams. These ideas then became the vernacular we would talk in when trying to come up with a specific concept. As with everything else, though, data was our guide. No matter how cool we thought something was, if the data showed it wasnt getting the results we wanted, we would try another approach. Many of the designs we rolled out started by a designer or developer finding a cool idea somewhere and emailing it around to the two teams. These ideas then became the vernacular we would talk in when trying to come up with a specific concept. The process was much like any good digital agency. Wed have a kickoff meeting with PMs, Producers, Leads, etc. to figure out the scope of a project. Someone would send around the notes from that, and wed all tweak them for a bit then send up to our leadership to get sign off on the direction we wanted to go in. After incorporating feedback, either a designer would begin comps or, for more complicated projects, a developer would begin prototypes. The assigned developer and designer would iterate through those until the project was live and ready for testing. Normally, we would send the staging version around for approvals at the same time the QA team was doing cross-browser testing. The team would iterate on the notes from both and then wed launch. Keep in mind that near the end of the summer, we were doing this on a dozen projects or more simultaneously. Many times, wed do this whole cycle in a single day. Q We have read a bit about the technical issues that plagued the Romney camp throughout the campaign, including server outages and hard drive failures. What were some of the most important strategic decisions the Obama team made to avoid these problems? I think our approach basically boiled down to pragmatic paranoia. This was my first campaign as a staffer, but we had many alumni from 08 with us. I think I had been in Chicago less than a week before Id heard about the failure of Houdini, which was the Obama 08 system akin to Romneys Orca. Because of the institutional experience with this voter monitoring systems failure, we never put ourselves in a place where a single system failure could do real damage. We had the luxury of time, which we used in part to build redundancies. Our payment processor, for instance, was actually one inhouse system and one vendor system that Akamai flipped between automatically if one side went down. That system worked so well we replicated it for polling places. We had two APIs, one internal and one powered by Google, with a thin PHP app to make the output the same. Not only could Akamai automatically fail between them without the end user noticing, but we had a system in place where we could choose which states used which system proactively. This let us prevent a traffic spike outage. The systems we relied upon specifically for Election Day all had two backup systems: one powered by Google Doc spreadsheets and one consisting of printed hard-copies of critical data. I think our approach basically boiled down to pragmatic paranoia. Q How did responsive design play a role in the Obama strategic team? Was the design mobile first? Early on, the campaign tried making a jQuery Mobile powered site, but maintaining two templates for everything simply wasnt going to scale. We were seeing 25% of our traffic come from mobile devices, but almost none of our donations. When we set out to do a site overhaul in Fall 2011, it was a foregone conclusion we would do mobile-first, responsive/adaptive. It was a learning process for all of us. If theres one takeaway I would really stress, mobile-first doesnt mean starting with a 320 pixel wide design, it means starting with a low bandwidth experience. We learned that lesson over and over throughout the course of the campaign. Mobile first is a comprehensive approach including content creation that is mobile friendly, design that is flexible and code that is as lean as possible.

Mobile-first doesnt mean starting with a 320 pixel wide design, it means starting with a low bandwidth experience. Q What was the biggest lesson to be learned about large-scale deployment? The biggest lesson I learned about large-scale deployment is hire smart people. When youre trying to tune for scale, especially in the hockey stick curve we knew we were going to have, you need people at every part of the stack thinking about how to be more efficient. Most of my team had no experience at the kind of scale we wound up working at, but we learned quickly and adapted. Q What was the general management structure of projects for the Obama team? I truly believe that this is the last presidential campaign where the Internet people will be separated into their own group. The structure varied by project, but our overall structure was basically divided into those three buckets I mentioned before: fundraising, persuasion and turning out voters. Internally, there was a Digital Department, which my team was part of along with Design, Online Ads, Social, Email, Content, Digital Analytics, Program Managers, Video, Online Organizing, Rapid Response and our management team. Generally speaking, we handled all the public-facing work of the campaign online. Additionally, the Tech Department was responsible for the infrastructure (our DevOps team) and the server-side code for virtually everything we did. There was some crossover between the two departments as well. A large part of my role was coordinating with Tech and DevOps as we constantly deployed more and more systems I truly believe that this is the last presidential campaign where the Internet people will be separated into their own group. Our work covered every area of the campaign at some point. 2016 should be much more of a matrix org chart than a hierarchical one. In Closing Thanks again to Daniel for agreeing to speak with us. To stay up to date, be sure to follow him on Twitter, and keep an eye on his website. AdWeek: Here's One Advertiser Who Swears Mobile Ads Work: Obama http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/heres-one-advertiser-who-swears-mobile-ads-work-obama146044 By Christopher Heine December 18, 2012 President Barack Obama's reelection effort spent millions on mobile ads that targeted down to the neighborhood level in battleground states, digital operatives for the campaign told Adweek. And the victors claim targeting on-the-go voters moved the needle, underscoring a 2012 that saw the mobile marketing space seemingly toddle towards significantly impacting the larger advertising world. In the case of mobile video ads, the Democratic operatives said they got click-through rates from 3 percent to 19.5 percent during the race's crucial stretch run when Mitt Romney appeared to surge in late October and early November. The promos criticized the GOP candidate's tax plan and praised Obama's auto industry bailout, among other examples. "We knew we had to be in mobile," said Shannon Lee, the campaign's digital lead who previously worked at interactive shop Digitas. "The work we did there was exciting because we felt it was directly impacting the election."

The ads typically zeroed in on young, female and Hispanic voters in Ohio, Michigan, Nevada, Iowa, Florida and Colorado, appearing via mobile properties owned by major regional news outlets such as the Cincinnati Enquirer, Detroit Free Press, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Des Moines Register, Miami Herald and Denver Post. The Obama digital team also bought ads directly from CNN, The Weather Channel, Associated Press and Pandora, leveraging through those publishers' mobile apps. Interestingly, Lee said paid mobile Web and mobile app ads were not run to increase Obama for America donations but rather to persuade viewers and get out the vote. "Email and text were already converting a lot of those people for donations," she said. "Our hypothesis was that taking out your credit card number would be too laborious when it came to investing in paid mobile ads." With escalating smartphone and tablet sales, the mobile space will almost certainly be one to watch during election cycles to come. Greg Hallinan, CMO of Verve Mobile, which helped the Democratic campaign target mobile ads, proclaimed, "On the mobile front, the 2008 election was about text messages. This one was about targeted mobile advertising." Huffington Post: What's Next for Obama For America's Data and Technology? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-pugh/obama-for-america-data_b_2325478.html By Jim Pugh and Nathan Woodhull December 18, 2012 If you've been following post-election news, you've no doubt heard about Barack Obama's "big data" advantage. The story has been the unprecedented investment in mining personal information for all kinds of wacky stuff. According to various articles, the campaign used data for everything from inviting donors to dinner with Sarah Jessica Parker to identifying potential voters through their visits to porn sites. It's true that data was a game changer for the Obama campaign, but the reason is much less salacious than many reporters would have you believe. The campaign built an integrated database, which combined supporters' online activity, actions in the field, and public voting records into a single unified view of every American. On top of that data foundation, a large team of developers built community organizing software that empowered volunteers to become more deeply involved with the President's grassroots field operation. The result was unprecedented efficiency in volunteer engagement and voter outreach. Supporters who signed up to help online received a personal call from their neighborhood leader the next day. Volunteers called only the most statistically persuadable potential supporters. Anyone who connected their Facebook account to the campaign was encouraged to send voting turnout messages to the specific friends who needed the extra push most. All of this led to more volunteers, more supporters, and increased turnout -which all meant more Obama votes on Election Day. But Election Day shouldn't be the end for these systems. We need to keep moving forward, continue the investment, and make them available to the whole movement. Don't Abandon the Technology Now that the election is over, funding will be tight. The donations that poured in during the election have dried up and hard choices need to be made. One option is to mothball this infrastructure and plan to spin it up again for the next presidential election. This approach is attractive from a financial perspective, as no additional resources would be needed in the off cycle to make it happen.

But this would be a mistake. The campaign's advantage this cycle wasn't just bits and bytes, but the institutional experience and knowledge that had been building since the President's primary campaign in 2007. Instead of shelving all these systems, we should make a continued investment in maintaining and improving them. Republicans are lagging behind Democrats right now on the data and technology front, but after the shellacking they experienced in the last election, there's little doubt that they'll be pouring in resources to catch up. Without sustained investment from our party, our advantage may be erased in the coming years. Not only would Republicans be moving ahead, but without staff to maintain institutional knowledge and adapt the systems to changing technology, Democrats could actually start the next election cycle behind where we're at right now. We need to keep moving forward if we want to keep our advantage on this front. The technology industry never stops moving forward. Neither should we. Make Tools Available to All Progressives An investment in building on these systems offers another possibility as well: providing access to the rest of the progressive movement. Right now, only presidential campaigns have the resources to build systems of this sophistication. The data and technology infrastructure from the Obama campaign cost millions of dollars to build, and even the most well-funded senate campaigns couldn't afford anything close to that. But with some additional work, the data and tech infrastructure from the Obama campaign could be adapted to offer the same functionality to other progressive candidates and groups, giving them the opportunity to use these systems with their own supporters and volunteers. For smaller campaigns that would have no chance of creating these systems on their own, this could be a game-changing step forward. And beyond the benefit to the Democratic Party and progressive movement, it could provide a path to fund the continued investment, via paid licensing from these outside campaigns and organizations A Sustained Tech Commitment for 21st-Century Politics The roller-coaster of scaling up and scaling down that comes with elections has always been the standard for political organizations. If we want to stay competitive on the data and technology front, this approach needs to be changed. A 21st-century political movement must have a serious on-going commitment to staying at the forefront of technological advancement. With the infrastructure coming out of the Obama campaign, we've got a huge lead in this area. Sadly, that is not what has happened so far. Since Election Day, the Democratic National Committee has laid off an unprecedented number of technology staff members, some of whom had been at the party for over ten years. The Obama Campaign's technology team is scattering to the winds and returning to industry. The window of opportunity to stay ahead of the technological curve is closing -- our party needs to change course now or risk being left behind. Technology Review: How President Obamas campaign used big data to rally individual voters, Part 3 http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/508856/obamas-data-techniques-will-rule-futureelections/ By Sasha Issenberg December 18, 2012 The March In the summer of 2011, Carol Davidsen received a message from Dan Wagner. Already the Obama campaign was known for its relentless e-mails beseeching supporters to give their money or time, but this one offered

something that intrigued Davidsen: a job. Wagner had sorted the campaigns list of donors, stretching back to 2008, to find those who described their occupation with terms like data and analytics and sent them all invitations to apply for work in his new analytics department. Davidsen was working at Navic Networks, a Microsoft-owned company that wrote code for set-top cable boxes to create a record of a users DVR or tuner history, when she heeded Wagners call. One year before Election Day, she started work in the campaigns technology department to serve as product manager for Narwhal. That was the code name, borrowed from a tusked whale, for an ambitious effort to match records from previously unconnected databases so that a users online interactions with the campaign could be synchronized. With Narwhal, e-mail blasts asking people to volunteer could take their past donation history into consideration, and the algorithms determining how much a supporter would be asked to contribute could be shaped by knowledge about his or her reaction to previous solicitations. This integration enriched a technique, common in website development, that Obamas online fund-raising efforts had used to good effect in 2008: the A/B test, in which users are randomly directed to different versions of a thing and their responses are compared. Now analysts could leverage personal data to identify the attributes of those who responded, and use that knowledge to refine subsequent appeals. You can cite peoples other types of engagement, says Amelia Showalter, Obamas director of digital analytics. We discovered that there were a lot of things that built goodwill, like signing the presidents birthday card or getting a free bumper sticker, that led them to become more engaged with the campaign in other ways. If online communication had been the aspect of the 2008 campaign subjected to the most rigorous empirical examinationits easy to randomly assign e-mails in an A/B test and compare click-through rates or donation levelsmass-media strategy was among those that received the least. Television and radio ads had to be purchased by geographic zone, and the available data on who watches which channels or shows, collected by research firms like Nielsen and Scarborough, often included little more than viewer age and gender. That might be good enough to guide buys for Schick or Foot Locker, but its of limited value for advertisers looking to define audiences in political terms. As campaign manager Jim Messina prepared to spend as much as half a billion dollars on mass media for Obamas relection, he set out to reinvent the process for allocating resources across broadcast, cable, satellite, and online channels. If you think about the universe of possible places for an advertiser, its almost infinite, says Amy Gershkoff, who was hired as the campaigns media-planning director on the strength of her successful negotiations, while at her firm Changing Targets in 2009, to link the information from cable systems to individual microtargeting profiles. There are tens of millions of opportunities where a campaign can put its next dollar. You have all this great, robust voter data that doesnt fit together with the media data. How you knit that together is a challenge. By the start of 2012, -Wagner had deftly wrested command of media planning into his own department. As he expanded the scope of analytics, he defined his purview as the study and practice of resource optimization for the purpose of improving programs and earning votes more efficiently. That usually meant calculating, for any campaign activity, the number of votes gained through a given amount of contact at a given cost. But when it came to buying media, such calculations had been simply impossible, because campaigns were unable to link what they knew about voters to what cable providers knew about their customers. Obamas advisors decided that the data made available in the private sector had long led political advertisers to ask the wrong questions. Walsh says of the effort to reimagine the media-targeting process: It was not to get a better understanding of what 35-plus women watch on TV. It was to find out how many of our persuadable voters were watching those dayparts.

Davidsen, whose previous work had left her intimately familiar with the rich data sets held in set-top boxes, understood that a lot of that data was available in the form of tuner and DVR histories collected by cable providers and then aggregated by research firms. For privacy reasons, however, the information was not available at the individual level. The hardest thing in media buying right now is the lack of information, she says. Davidsen began negotiating to have research firms repackage their data in a form that would permit the campaign to access the individual histories without violating the cable providers privacy standards. Under a $350,000 deal she worked out with one company, Rentrak, the campaign provided a list of persuadable voters and their addresses, derived from its microtargeting models, and the company looked for them in the cable providers billing files. When a record matched, Rentrak would issue it a unique household ID that identified viewing data from a single set-top box but masked any personally identifiable information. The Obama campaign had created its own television ratings system, a kind of Nielsen in which the only viewers who mattered were those not yet fully committed to a presidential candidate. But Davidsen had to get the information into a practical form by early May, when Obama strategists planned to start running their anti-Romney ads. She oversaw the development of a software platform the Obama staff called the Optimizer, which broke the day into 96 quarter-hour segments and assessed which time slots across 60 channels offered the greatest number of persuadable targets per dollar. (By September, she had unlocked an even richer trove of data: a cable system in Toledo, Ohio, that tracked viewers tuner histories by the second.) The revolution of media buying in this campaign, says Terry Walsh, who cordinated the campaigns polling and advertising spending, was to turn what was a broadcast medium into something that looks a lot more like a narrowcast medium. When the Obama campaign did use television as a mass medium, it was because the Optimizer had concluded it would be a more efficient way of reaching persuadable targets. Sometimes a national cable ad was a better bargain than a large number of local buys in the 66 media markets reaching battleground states. But the occasional national buy also had other benefits. It could boost fund-raising and motivate volunteers in states that werent essential to Obamas Electoral College arithmetic. And, says Davidsen, it helps hide some of the strategy of your buying. Even without that tactic, Obamas buys perplexed the Romney analysts in Boston. They had invested in their own media-intelligence platform, called Centraforce. It used some of the same aggregated data sources that were feeding into the Optimizer, and at times both seemed to send the campaigns to the same unlikely ad blocksfor example, in reruns on TV Land. But there was a lot more to what Alex Lundry, who created Romneys data science unit, called Obamas highly variable media strategy. Many of the Democrats ads were placed in fringe markets, on marginal stations, and at odd times where few political candidates had ever seen value. Romneys data scientists simply could not decode those decisions without the voter models or persuasion experiments that helped Obama pick out individual targets. We were never able to figure out the level of advertising and what they were trying to do, says Romney data analyst Brent McGoldrick. It wasnt worth reverse-engineering, because what are you going to do? The Community Although the voter opinion tables that emerged from the Cave looked a lot like polls, the analysts who produced them were disinclined to call them polls. The campaign had plenty of those, generated by a publicopinion team of eight outside firms, and new arrivals at the Chicago headquarters were shocked by the variegated breadth of the research that arrived on their desks daily. We believed in combining the qual, which we did more than any campaign ever, with the quant, which we [also] did more than any other

campaign, to make sure all communication for every level of the campaign was informed by what they found, says David Simas, the director of opinion research. Simas considered himself the air-traffic controller for such research, which was guided by a series of voter diaries that Obamas team commissioned as it prepared for the relection campaign. We needed to do something almost divorced from politics and get to the way theyre seeing their lives, he says. The lead pollster, Joel Benenson, had respondents write about their experiences. The entries frequently used the word disappointment, which helped explain attitudes toward Obamas administration but also spoke to a broader dissatisfaction with economic conditions. That became the foundation for our entire research program, says Simas. Obamas advisors used those diaries to develop messages that contrasted Obama with Romney as a fighter for the middle class. Benensons national polls tested language to see which affected voters responses in survey experiments and direct questioning. A quartet of polling firms were assigned specific states and asked to figure out which national themes fit best with local concerns. Eventually, Obamas media advisors created more than 500 ads and tested them before an online sample of viewers selected by focus-group director David Binder. But the campaign had to play defense, too. When something potentially damaging popped up in the news, like Democratic consultant Hilary Rosens declaration that Ann Romney had never worked a day in her life, Simas checked in with the Community, a private online bulletin board populated by 100 undecided voters Binder had recruited. Simas would monitor Community conversations to see which news events penetrated voter consciousness. Sometimes he had Binder show its members controversial materiallike a video clip of Obamas You didnt build that commentand ask if it changed their views of the candidate. For me, it was a very quick way to draw back and determine whether something was a problem or not a problem, says Simas. When Wagner started packaging his departments research into something that campaign leadership could read like a poll, a pattern became apparent. Obamas numbers in key battleground states were low in the analytic tables, but Romneys were too. There were simply more undecided voters in such states sometimes nearly twice as many as the traditional pollsters found. A basic methodological distinction explained this discrepancy: microtargeting models required interviewing a lot of unlikely voters to give shape to a profile of what a nonvoter looked like, while pollsters tracking the horse race wanted to screen more rigorously for those likely to cast a ballot. The rivalry between the two units trying to measure public opinion grew intense: the analytic polls were a threat to the pollsters primacy and, potentially, to their business model. I spent a lot of time within the campaign explaining to people that the numbers we get from analytics and the numbers we get from external pollsters did not need strictly to be reconciled, says Walsh. They were different. The scope of the analytic research enabled it to pick up movements too small for traditional polls to perceive. As Simas reviewed Wagners analytic tables in mid-October, he was alarmed to see that what had been a Romney lead of one to two points in Green Bay, Wisconsin, had grown into an advantage of between six and nine. Green Bay was the only media market in the state to experience such a shift, and there was no obvious explanation. But it was hard to discount. Whereas a standard 800-person statewide poll might have reached 100 respondents in the Green Bay area, analytics was placing 5,000 calls in Wisconsin in each fiveday cycleand benefiting from tens of thousands of other field contactsto produce microtargeting scores. Analytics was talking to as many people in the Green Bay media market as traditional pollsters were talking to across Wisconsin every week. We could have the confidence level to say, This isnt noise, says Simas. So the campaigns media buyers aired an ad attacking Romney on outsourcing and beseeched Messina to

send former president Bill Clinton and Obama himself to rallies there. (In the end, Romney took the county 50.3 to 48.5 percent.) For the most part, however, the analytic tables demonstrated how stable the electorate was, and how predictable individual voters could be. Polls from the media and academic institutions may have fluctuated by the hour, but drawing on hundreds of data points to judge whether someone was a likely voter proved more reliable than using a seven-question battery like Gallups to do the same. When you see this Pogo stick happening with the public datathe electorate is just not that volatile, says Mitch Stewart, director of the Democratic campaign group Organizing for America. The analytic data offered a source of calm. Romneys advisors were similarly sanguine, but they were losing. They, too, believed it possible to project the composition of the electorate, relying on a method similar to Gallups: pollster Neil Newhouse asked respondents how likely they were to cast a ballot. Those who answered that question with a seven or below on a 10-point scale were disregarded as unlikely to vote. But that ignored the experimental methods that made it possible to measure individual behavior in more detail. As a result, the Republicans failed to see how the Obama campaign was mobilizing even those voters who looked to Election Day without enthusiasm or intensity. On the last day of the race, Wagner and his analytics staff left the Cave and rode the elevator up one floor in the campaigns Chicago skyscraper to join members of other departments in a boiler room established to help track votes as they came in. Already, for over a month, Obamas analysts had been counting ballots from states that allowed citizens to vote early. Each day, the campaign overlaid the lists of early voters released by election authorities with its modeling scores to project how many votes they could claim as their own. By Election Day, Wagners analytic tables turned into predictions. Before the polls opened in Ohio, authorities in Hamilton County, the states third-largest and home to Cincinnati, released the names of 103,508 voters who had cast early ballots over the previous month. Wagner sorted them by microtargeting projections and found that 58,379 had individual support scores over 50.1that is, the campaigns models predicted that they were more likely than not to have voted for Obama. That amounted to 56.4 percent of the countys votes, or a raw lead of 13,249 votes over Romney. Early ballots were the first to be counted after Ohios polls closed, and Obamas senior staff gathered around screens in the boiler room to see the initial tally. The numbers settled almost exactly where Wagner had said they would: Obama got 56.6 percent of the votes in Hamilton County. In Florida, he was as close to the mark; Obamas margin was only twotenths of a percent off. After those first two numbers, we knew, says Bird. It was dead-on. When Obama was relected, and by a far larger Electoral College margin than most outsiders had anticipated, his staff was exhilarated but not surprised. The next morning, Mitch Stewart sat in the boiler room, alone, monitoring the lagging votes as they came into Obamas servers from election authorities in Florida, the last state to name a winner. The presidency was no longer at stake; the only thing that still hung in the balance was the accuracy of the analytics departments predictions. The Legacy A few days after the election, as Florida authorities continued to count provisional ballots, a few staff members were directed, as four years before, to remain in Chicago. Their instructions were to produce another post-mortem report summing up the lessons of the past year and a half. The undertaking was called the Legacy Project, a grandiose title inspired by the idea that the innovations of Obama 2012 should be translated not only to the campaign of the next Democratic candidate for president but also to governance.

Obama had succeeded in convincing some citizens that a modest adjustment to their behavior would affect, however marginally, the result of an election. Could he make them feel the same way about Congress? Simas, who had served in the White House before joining the team, marveled at the intimacy of the campaign. Perhaps more than anyone else at headquarters, he appreciated the human aspect of politics. This had been his first presidential election, but before he became a political operative, Simas had been a politician himself, serving on the city council and school board in his hometown of Taunton, Massachusetts. He ran for office by knocking on doors and interacting individually with constituents (or those he hoped would become constituents), trying to track their moods and expectations. In many respects, analytics had made it possible for the Obama campaign to recapture that style of politics. Though the old guard may have viewed such techniques as a disruptive force in campaigns, they enabled a presidential candidate to view the electorate the way local candidates do: as a collection of people who make up a more perfect union, each of them approachable on his or her terms, their changing levels of support and enthusiasm open to measurement and, thus, to respect. What that gave us was the ability to run a national presidential campaign the way youd do a local ward campaign, Simas says. You know the people on your block. People have relationships with one another, and you leverage them so you know the way they talk about issues, what theyre discussing at the coffee shop. Few events in American life other than a presidential election touch 126 million adults, or even a significant fraction that many, on a single day. Certainly no corporation, no civic institution, and very few government agencies ever do. Obama did so by reducing every American to a series of numbers. Yet those numbers somehow captured the individuality of each voter, and they were not demographic classifications. The scores measured the ability of people to change politicsand to be changed by it. Read Write Web: How Obama Knew How You'd Vote, Even Before You Did http://readwrite.com/2012/12/17/how-obama-knew-how-youd-vote-even-before-you-did By Dan Rowinski December 17, 2012 Imagine you were a political analyst who time traveled from 1990s to November 5, 2012. A quick look at the national polls for the presidential election, you would probably have thought that Republican nominee Mitt Romney had a pretty good shot at claiming the presidency. Obviously, you - like many of the Republican faithful - would have been dead wrong. President Barack Obama and his team, though, likely knew that he would win, and by precisely how much, days before the actual voting even started. In the first of a three-part series on how Obama used technology to win the election, MIT Technology Review breaks down how the Presidents team used Big Data and sophisticated analytics at an almost unprecedented scale to track voters, and nudge them in the direction that the Obama team wanted them to go. What the Obama team did was little short of amazing. It essentially created a cohort-analysis system of data to judge every single voter it wanted to get to the polls. Obamas team took the usual system of analytics and reduced it to the most granular level: the individual voter. The analytics campaign, led by chief analytics officer Dan Wagner, was able to assign voters individual scores based on if and how they would vote. In doing this, Wagners team could accurately predict human behavior.

But underneath all that were scores describing particular voters: a new political currency that predicted the behavior of individual humans. The campaign didnt just know who you were; it knew exactly how it could turn you into the type of person it wanted you to be, wrote Technology Reviews guest contributor Sasha Issenberg. Florida election results 2012 In contrast, the Romney campaign was still in an earlier mode of data analytics, focused around larger cohorts such as campaign topics (the fall of Obama-backed solar energy provider Solyndra, for instance) and how individual ads affected the voter mindset. In part two of Issenbergs series, he notes that the Romney team understood it did not have the depth of ground-level analytics that the Obama team had and was forced to be reactionary to how the Obama campaign deployed its resources. For instance, why did Obama run 68 ads in a small Alabama town that traditionally voted Republican? Obama was likely targeting voters in Florida with his Alabama media buy, trying to sway voters in key counties like Holmes, Jackson, Walton and Gadsen. The Obama team likely knew that the state of Florida would come down to several thousand votes (which it did) and that eroding Romneys base there would be important to win the state. Of those counties, Obama won only Gadsen. But winning those counties was not as important to the Obama team as was making sure that people that supported him in 2008 also did so in 2012. For instance, in Jackson county, Obama received 7,342 (35.1%) votes in 2012 against 7,632 (35%) in 2008. Obama's goal in 2012 was to make sure that everybody that voted for him in 2008 also did so in 2012 while adding new voters as well. Even though he lost those counties, by matching his numbers in those two counties in an election where the Republican base was emotionally invested against him, Obama can count those Florida counties as a win. Considering that Obama beat Romney by only about 73,000 votes in Florida, those votes counted for a lot. Predicting Human Behavior Through Data Analysis By taking an approach to individual voter targeting and setting up the algorithms and databases to do it, Obamas team put itself on the forefront of a growing field of innovation: predictive analysis of individual human behavior and reaction. The largest technology companies and a growing number of advertisers are seen as leaders in this field. People like to joke that, Google knows everything about me. Well, it probably does. In a mobile application, for example, what buttons are the users most likely to push? Are they more or less likely to tap on an advertisement? What can the app publisher do to get users to open the app more often (increasing the likelihood of clicking an ad or buying in-app goods)? The next step is to apply those questions to specific cohorts. Is a woman aged 18-21 years more likely to re-engage with the app than a man of the same age? How many times does a 25-year-old man need to open an app before he makes his first in-app purchase? Companies like Apsalar, Flurry, Localytics, Sonamine and others are working on this type of cohort data - not just to understand how people use mobile apps, but how they can be influenced to perform particular actions. By analyzing millions of data sets created by touching items within an app, companies can guess with a very high degree of accuracy what you are going to do next. Once a company knows what you are going to do, it can then influence you to perform the actions it desires.

This is almost exactly what the Obama team did, except instead of mobile apps, it was millions upon millions of voters. The Obama team figured out what type of person a voter was and how that person would respond to certain types of stimuli - such as direct mail, person-to-person interviews, social media, advertising, and so on. Obama was then able to deploy his massive volunteer network (some 500,000 people) and other campaign resources as needed. Ultimately, this approach is what set apart Obama's campaign. It was not just having a smartphone app as a walk list (the list that volunteers use to see who has come to the polls) or keeping track of media sentiment through in-depth analytics. It was about having the most granular data possible and then knowing how to act on it. Some of the biggest tech companies in the world that specialize in behavioral data could not have done quite what the Obama team did by mixing social science (how users react to different stimuli) to structured big data. Technology Review: How President Obamas campaign used big data to rally individual voters, Part 2 http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/508851/how-obama-wrangled-data-to-win-his-secondterm/ By Sasha Issenberg December 17, 2012 The Experiments When Jim Messina arrived in Chicago as Obamas newly minted campaign manager in January of 2011, he imposed a mandate on his recruits: they were to make decisions based on measurable data. But that didnt mean quite what it had four years before. The 2008 campaign had been data-driven, as people liked to say. This reflected a principled imperative to challenge the political establishment with an empirical approach to electioneering, and it was greatly influenced by David Plouffe, the 2008 campaign manager, who loved metrics, spreadsheets, and performance reports. Plouffe wanted to know: How many of a field offices volunteer shifts had been filled last weekend? How much money did that ad campaign bring in? But for all its reliance on data, the 2008 Obama campaign had remained insulated from the most important methodological innovation in 21st-century politics. In 1998, Yale professors Don Green and Alan Gerber conducted the first randomized controlled trial in modern political science, assigning New Haven voters to receive nonpartisan election reminders by mail, phone, or in-person visit from a canvasser and measuring which group saw the greatest increase in turnout. The subsequent wave of field experiments by Green, Gerber, and their followers focused on mobilization, testing competing modes of contact and get-out-thevote language to see which were most successful. The first Obama campaign used the findings of such tests to tweak call scripts and canvassing protocols, but it never fully embraced the experimental revolution itself. After Dan Wagner moved to the DNC, the party decided it would start conducting its own experiments. He hoped the committee could become a driver of research for the Democratic Party. To that end, he hired the Analyst Institute, a Washington-based consortium founded under the AFL-CIOs leadership in 2006 to cordinate field research projects across the electioneering left and distribute the findings among allies. Much of the experimental worlds research had focused on voter registration, because that was easy to measure. The breakthrough was that registration no longer had to be approached passively; organizers did not have to simply wait for the unenrolled to emerge from anonymity, sign a form, and, they hoped, vote. New techniques made it possible to intelligently profile nonvoters: commercial data warehouses sold lists of all voting-age adults, and comparing those lists with registration rolls revealed

eligible candidates, each attached to a home address to which an application could be mailed. Applying microtargeting models identified which nonregistrants were most likely to be Democrats and which ones Republicans. The Obama campaign embedded social scientists from the Analyst Institute among its staff. Party officials knew that adding new Democratic voters to the registration rolls was a crucial element in their strategy for 2012. But already the campaign had ambitions beyond merely modifying nonparticipating citizens behavior through registration and mobilization. It wanted to take on the most vexing problem in politics: changing voters minds. The expansion of individual-level data had made possible the kind of testing that could help do that. Experimenters had typically calculated the average effect of their interventions across the entire population. But as campaigns developed deep portraits of the voters in their databases, it became possible to measure the attributes of the people who were actually moved by an experiments impact. A series of tests in 2006 by the womens group Emilys List had illustrated the potential of conducting controlled trials with microtargeting databases. When the group sent direct mail in favor of Democratic gubernatorial candidates, it barely budged those whose scores placed them in the middle of the partisan spectrum; it had a far greater impact upon those who had been profiled as soft (or nonideological) Republicans. That test, and others that followed, demonstrated the limitations of traditional targeting. Such techniques rested on a series of long-standing assumptionsfor instance, that middle-of-the-roaders were the most persuadable and that infrequent voters were the likeliest to be captured in a get-out-the-vote drive. But the experiments introduced new uncertainty. People who were identified as having a 50 percent likelihood of voting for a Democrat might in fact be torn between the two parties, or they might look like centrists only because no data attached to their records pushed a partisan prediction in one direction or another. The scores in the middle are the people we know less about, says Chris Wyant, a 2008 field organizer who became the campaigns general election director in Ohio four years later. The extent to which we were guessing about persuasion was not lost on any of us. One way the campaign sought to identify the ripest targets was through a series of what the Analyst Institute called experiment-informed programs, or EIPs, designed to measure how effective different types of messages were at moving public opinion. The traditional way of doing this had been to audition themes and language in focus groups and then test the winning material in polls to see which categories of voters responded positively to each approach. Any insights were distorted by the artificial settings and by the tiny samples of demographic subgroups in traditional polls. Youre making significant resource decisions based on 160 people? asks Mitch Stewart, director of the Democratic campaign group Organizing for America. Isnt that nuts? And people have been doing that for decades! An experimental program would use those steps to develop a range of prospective messages that could be subjected to empirical testing in the real world. Experimenters would randomly assign voters to receive varied sequences of direct mailfour pieces on the same policy theme, each making a slightly different case for Obamaand then use ongoing survey calls to isolate the attributes of those whose opinions changed as a result. In March, the campaign used this technique to test various ways of promoting the administrations healthcare policies. One series of mailers described Obamas regulatory reforms; another advised voters that they were now entitled to free regular check-ups and ought to schedule one. The experiment revealed how much voter response differed by age, especially among women. Older women thought more highly of the policies

when they received reminders about preventive care; younger women liked them more when they were told about contraceptive coverage and new rules that prohibited insurance companies from charging women more. When Paul Ryan was named to the Republican ticket in August, Obamas advisors rushed out an EIP that compared different lines of attack about Medicare. The results were surprising. The electorate *had seemed+ very inelastic, says Terry Walsh, who cordinated the campaigns polling and paid-media spending. In fact, when we did the Medicare EIPs, we got positive movement that was very heartening, because it was at a time when we were not seeing a lot of movement in the electorate. But that movement came from quarters where a traditional campaign would never have gone hunting for minds it could change. The Obama team found that voters between 45 and 65 were more likely to change their views about the candidates after hearing Obamas Medicare arguments than those over 65, who were currently eligible for the program. A similar strategy of targeting an unexpected population emerged from a July EIP testing Obamas messages aimed at women. The voters most responsive to the campaigns arguments about equal-pay measures and womens health, it found, were those whose likelihood of supporting the president was scored at merely 20 and 40 percent. Those scores suggested that they probably shared Republican attitudes; but here was one thing that could pull them to Obama. As a result, when Obama unveiled a direct-mail track addressing only womens issues, it wasnt to shore up interest among core parts of the Democratic coalition, but to reach over for conservatives who were at odds with their party on gender concerns. The whole goal of the womens track was to pick off votes for Romney, says Walsh. We were able to persuade people who fell low on candidate support scores if we gave them a specific message. At the same time, Obamas campaign was pursuing a second, even more audacious adventure in persuasion: one-on-one interaction. Traditionally, campaigns have restricted their persuasion efforts to channels like mass media or direct mail, where they can control presentation, language, and targeting. Sending volunteers to persuade voters would mean forcing them to interact with opponents, or with voters who were undecided because they were alienated from politics on delicate issues like abortion. Campaigns have typically resisted relinquishing control of ground-level interactions with voters to risk such potentially combustible situations; they felt they didnt know enough about their supporters or volunteers. You can have a negative impact, says Jeremy Bird, who served as national deputy director of Organizing for America. You can hurt your candidate. In February, however, Obama volunteers attempted 500,000 conversations with the goal of winning new supporters. Voters whod been randomly selected from a group identified as persuadable were polled after a phone conversation that began with a volunteer reading from a script. We definitely find certain people moved more than other people, says Bird. Analysts identified their attributes and made them the core of a persuasion model that predicted, on a scale of 0 to 10, the likelihood that a voter could be pulled in Obamas direction after a single volunteer interaction. The experiment also taught Obamas field department about its volunteers. Those in California, which had always had an exceptionally mature volunteer organization for a non--battleground state, turned out to be especially persuasive: voters called by Californians, no matter what state they were in themselves, were more likely to become Obama supporters. With these findings in hand, Obamas strategists grew confident that they were no longer restricted to advertising as a channel for persuasion. They began sending trained volunteers to knock on doors or make phone calls with the objective of changing minds. That dramatic shift in the culture of electioneering was felt on the streets, but it was possible only because of advances in analytics. Chris Wegrzyn, a database applications developer, developed a program code-named Airwolf that matched county and state lists of people who had requested mail ballots with the campaigns

list of e-mail addresses. Likely Obama supporters would get regular reminders from their local field organizers, asking them to return their ballots, and, once they had, a message thanking them and proposing other ways to be involved in the campaign. The local organizer would receive daily lists of the voters on his or her turf who had outstanding ballots so that the campaign could follow up with personal contact by phone or at the doorstep. It is a fundamental way of tying together the online and offline worlds, says Wagner. Wagner, however, was turning his attention beyond the field. By June of 2011, he was chief analytics officer for the campaign and had begun making the rounds of the other units at headquarters, from fund-raising to communications, offering to help solve their problems with data. He imagined the analytics department now a 54-person staff, housed in a windowless office known as the Caveas an in-house consultancy with other parts of the campaign as its clients. Theres a process of helping people learn about the tools so they can be a participant in the process, he says. We essentially built products for each of those various departments that were paired up with a massive database we had. The Flow As job notices seeking specialists in text analytics, computational advertising, and online experiments came out of the incumbents campaign, Mitt Romneys advisors at the Republicans headquarters in Bostons North End watched with a combination of awe and perplexity. Throughout the primaries, Romney had appeared to be the only Republican running a 21st-century campaign, methodically banking early votes in states like Florida and Ohio before his disorganized opponents could establish operations there. But the Republican winners relative sophistication in the primaries belied a poverty of expertise compared with the Obama campaign. Since his first campaign for governor of Massachusetts, in 2002, Romney had relied upon -TargetPoint Consulting, a Virginia firm that was then a pioneer in linking information from consumer data warehouses to voter registration records and using it to develop individual-level predictive models. It was TargetPoints CEO, Alexander Gage, who had coined the term microtargeting to describe the process, which he modeled on the corporate worlds approach to customer relationship management. Such techniques had offered George W. Bushs relection campaign a significant edge in targeting, but Republicans had done little to institutionalize that advantage in the years since. By 2006, Democrats had not only matched Republicans in adopting commercial marketing techniques; they had moved ahead by integrating methods developed in the social sciences. Romneys advisors knew that Obama was building innovative internal data analytics departments, but they didnt feel a need to match those activities. I dont think we thought, relative to the marketplace, we could be the best at data in-house all the time, Romneys digital director, Zac Moffatt, said in July. Our idea is to find the best firms to work with us. As a result, Romney remained dependent on TargetPoint to develop voter segments, often just once, and then deliver them to the campaigns databases. That was the structure Obama had abandoned after winning the nomination in 2008. In May a TargetPoint vice president, Alex Lundry, took leave from his post at the firm to assemble a data science unit within Romneys headquarters. To round out his team, Lundry brought in Tom Wood, a University of Chicago postdoctoral student in political science, and Brent McGoldrick, a veteran of Bushs 2004 campaign who had left politics for the consulting firm Financial Dynamics (later FTI Consulting), where he helped financial-services, health-care, and energy companies communicate better. But Romneys data science team was less than one-tenth the size of Obamas analytics department. Without a large in-house staff to handle the massive national data sets that made it possible to test and track citizens, Romneys data scientists never tried to deepen their understanding of individual behavior. Instead, they fixated on trying to

unlock one big, persistent mystery, which Lundry framed this way: How can we get a sense of whether this advertising is working?

You usually get GRPs and tracking polls, he says, referring to the gross ratings points that are the basic unit of measuring television buys. Theres a very large causal leap you have to make from one to the other. Lundry decided to focus on more manageable ways of measuring what he called the information flow. His team converted topics of political communication into discrete units they called entities. They initially classified 200 of them, including issues like the auto industry bailout, controversies like the one surrounding federal funding for the solar-power company Solyndra, and catchphrases like the war on women. When a new concept (such as Obamas offhand remark, during a speech about our common dependence on infrastructure, that you didnt build that) emerged as part of the election-year lexicon, the analysts added it to the list. They tracked each entity on the National Dialogue Monitor, TargetPoints system for measuring the frequency and tone with which certain topics are mentioned across all media. TargetPoint also integrated content collected from newspaper websites and closed-caption transcripts of broadcast programs. Lundrys team aimed to examine how every entity fared over time in each of two categories: the informal sphere of social media, especially Twitter, and the journalistic product that campaigns call earned press coverage. Ultimately, Lundry wanted to assess the impact that each type of public attention had on what mattered most to them: Romneys position in the horse race. He turned to vector autoregression models, which equities traders use to isolate the influence of single variables on market movements. In this case, Lundrys team looked for patterns in the relationship between the National Dialogue Monitors data and Romneys numbers in Gallups daily tracking polls. By the end of July, they thought they had identified a three-step process they called Woods Triangle. Within three or four days of a new entitys entry into the conversation, either through paid ads or through the news cycle, it was possible to make a well-informed hypothesis about whether the topic was likely to win media attention by tracking whether it generated Twitter chatter. That informal conversation among political-class elites typically led to traditional print or broadcast press coverage one to two days later, and that, in turn, might have an impact on the horse race. We saw this process over and over again, says Lundry. They began to think of ads as a shock to the systema way to either introduce a new topic or restore focus on an area in which elite interest had faded. If an entity didnt gain its own energyas when the Republicans charged over the summer that the White House had waived the work requirements in the federal welfare rulesLundry would propose a re-shock to the system with another ad on the subject five to seven days later. After 12 to 14 days, Lundry found, an entity had moved through the system and exhausted its ability to move public opinionso he would recommend to the campaigns communications staff that they move on to something new. Those insights offered campaign officials a theory of information flows, but they provided no guidance in how to allocate campaign resources in order to win the Electoral College. Assuming that Obama had superior ground-level data and analytics, Romneys campaign tried to leverage its rivals strategy to shape its own; if Democrats thought a state or media market was competitive, maybe that was evidence that Republicans should think so too. We were necessarily reactive, because we were putting together the plane as it took off, Lundry says. They had an enormous head start on us.

Romneys political department began holding regular meetings to look at where in the country the Obama campaign was focusing resources like ad dollars and the presidents time. The goal was to try to divine the calculations behind those decisions. It was, in essence, the way Microsofts Bing approached Google: trying to reverse-engineer the market leaders code by studying the visible output. We watch where the president goes, Dan Centinello, the Romney deputy political director who oversaw the meetings, said over the summer. Obamas media-buying strategy proved particularly hard to decipher. In early September, as part of his standard review, Lundry noticed that the week after the Democratic convention, Obama had aired 68 ads in Dothan, Alabama, a town near the Florida border. Dothan was one of the countrys smallest media markets, and Alabama one of the safest Republican states. Even though the area was known to savvy ad buyers as one of the places where a media market crosses state lines, Dothan TV stations reached only about 9,000 Florida voters, and around 7,000 of them had voted for John McCain in 2008. This is a hard-core Republican media market, Lundry says. Its incredibly tiny. But they were advertising there. Romneys advisors might have formed a theory about the broader media environment, but whatever was sending Obama hunting for a small pocket of votes was beyond their measurement. We could tell, says McGoldrick, that there was something in the algorithms that was telling them what to run. Technology Review: How President Obamas campaign used big data to rally individual voters, Part 1 http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/508836/how-obama-used-big-data-to-rally-voters-part-1/ By Sasha Issenberg December 16, 2012 Two years after Barack Obamas election as president, Democrats suffered their worst defeat in decades. The congressional majorities that had given Obama his legislative successes, reforming the health-insurance and financial markets, were swept away in the midterm elections; control of the House flipped and the Democrats lead in the Senate shrank to an ungovernably slim margin. Pundits struggled to explain the rise of the Tea Party. Voters disappointment with the Obama agenda was evident as independents broke right and Democrats stayed home. In 2010, the Democratic National Committee failed its first test of the Obama era: it had not kept the Obama coalition together. But for Democrats, there was bleak consolation in all this: Dan Wagner had seen it coming. When Wagner was hired as the DNCs targeting director, in January of 2009, he became responsible for collecting voter information and analyzing it to help the committee approach individual voters by direct mail and phone. But he appreciated that the raw material he was feeding into his statistical models amounted to a series of surveys on voters attitudes and preferences. He asked the DNCs technology department to develop software that could turn that information into tables, and he called the result Survey Manager. That fall, when a special election was held to fill an open congressional seat in upstate New York, Wagner successfully predicted the final margin within 150 voteswell before Election Day. Months later, pollsters projected that Martha Coakley was certain to win another special election, to fill the Massachusetts Senate seat left empty by the death of Ted Kennedy. But Wagners Survey Manager correctly predicted that the Republican Scott Brown was likely to prevail in the strongly Democratic state. Its one thing to be right when youre going to win, says Jeremy Bird, who served as national deputy director of Organizing for America, the Obama campaign in abeyance, housed at the DNC. Its another thing to be right when youre going to lose. It is yet another thing to be right five months before youre going to lose. As the 2010 midterms approached, Wagner built statistical models for selected Senate races and 74 congressional districts. Starting in June, he began predicting the elections outcomes, forecasting the margins of victory with what turned out to be

improbable accuracy. But he hadnt gotten there with traditional polls. He had counted votes one by one. His first clue that the party was in trouble came from thousands of individual survey calls matched to rich statistical profiles in the DNCs databases. Core Democratic voters were telling the DNCs callers that they were much less likely to vote than statistical probability suggested. Wagner could also calculate how much the Democrats mobilization programs would do to increase turnout among supporters, and in most races he knew it wouldnt be enough to cover the gap revealing itself in Survey Managers tables. His congressional predictions were off by an average of only 2.5 percent. That was a proof point for a lot of people who dont understand the math behind it but understand the value of what that math produces, says Mitch Stewart, Organizing for Americas director. Once that first special *election+ happened, his word was the gold standard at the DNC. The significance of Wagners achievement went far beyond his ability to declare winners months before Election Day. His approach amounted to a decisive break with 20th-century tools for tracking public opinion, which revolved around quarantining small samples that could be treated as representative of the whole. Wagner had emerged from a cadre of analysts who thought of voters as individuals and worked to aggregate projections about their opinions and behavior until they revealed a composite picture of everyone. His techniques marked the fulfillment of a new way of thinking, a decade in the making, in which voters were no longer trapped in old political geographies or tethered to traditional demographic categories, such as age or gender, depending on which attributes pollsters asked about or how consumer marketers classified them for commercial purposes. Instead, the electorate could be seen as a collection of individual citizens who could each be measured and assessed on their own terms. Now it was up to a candidate who wanted to lead those people to build a campaign that would interact with them the same way.

After the voters returned Obama to office for a second term, his campaign became celebrated for its use of technologymuch of it developed by an unusual team of coders and engineersthat redefined how individuals could use the Web, social media, and smartphones to participate in the political process. A mobile app allowed a canvasser to download and return walk sheets without ever entering a campaign office; a Web platform called Dashboard gamified volunteer activity by ranking the most active supporters; and targeted sharing protocols mined an Obama backers Facebook network in search of friends the campaign wanted to register, mobilize, or persuade. But underneath all that were scores describing particular voters: a new political currency that predicted the behavior of individual humans. The campaign didnt just know who you were; it knew exactly how it could turn you into the type of person it wanted you to be. The Scores Four years earlier, Dan Wagner had been working at a Chicago economic consultancy, using forecasting skills developed studying econometrics at the University of Chicago, when he fell for Barack Obama and decided he wanted to work on his home-state senators 2008 presidential campaign. Wagner, then 24, was soon in Des Moines, handling data entry for the state voter file that guided Obama to his crucial victory in the Iowa caucuses. He bounced from state to state through the long primary calendar, growing familiar with voter data and the ways of using statistical models to intelligently sort the electorate. For the general election, he was named lead targeter for the Great Lakes/Ohio River Valley region, the most intense battleground in the country.

After Obamas victory, many of his top advisors decamped to Washington to make preparations for governing. Wagner was told to stay behind and serve on a post-election task force that would review a campaign that had looked, to the outside world, technically flawless. In the 2008 presidential election, Obamas targeters had assigned every voter in the country a pair of scores based on the probability that the individual would perform two distinct actions that mattered to the campaign: casting a ballot and supporting Obama. These scores were derived from an unprecedented volume of ongoing survey work. For each battleground state every week, the campaigns call centers conducted 5,000 to 10,000 so-called short-form interviews that quickly gauged a voters preferences, and 1,000 interviews in a long-form version that was more like a traditional poll. To derive individual-level predictions, algorithms trawled for patterns between these opinions and the data points the campaign had assembled for every voteras many as one thousand variables each, drawn from voter registration records, consumer data warehouses, and past campaign contacts. This innovation was most valued in the field. There, an almost perfect cycle of microtargeting models directed volunteers to scripted conversations with specific voters at the door or over the phone. Each of those interactions produced data that streamed back into Obamas servers to refine the models pointing volunteers toward the next door worth a knock. The efficiency and scale of that process put the Democrats well ahead when it came to profiling voters. John McCains campaign had, in most states, run its statistical model just once, assigning each voter to one of its microtargeting segments in the summer. McCains advisors were unable to recalculate the probability that those voters would support their candidate as the dynamics of the race changed. Obamas scores, on the other hand, adjusted weekly, responding to new events like Sarah Palins vice-presidential nomination or the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Within the campaign, however, the Obama data operations were understood to have shortcomings. As was typical in political information infrastructure, knowledge about people was stored separately from data about the campaigns interactions with them, mostly because the databases built for those purposes had been developed by different consultants who had no interest in making their systems work together. But the task force knew the next campaign wasnt stuck with that situation. Obama would run his final race not as an insurgent against a party establishment, but as the establishment itself. For four years, the task force members knew, their team would control the Democratic Partys apparatus. Their demands, not the offerings of consultants and vendors, would shape the marketplace. Their report recommended developing a constituent relationship management system that would allow staff across the campaign to look up individuals not just as voters or volunteers or donors or website users but as citizens in full. We realized there was a problem with how our data and infrastructure interacted with the rest of the campaign, and we ought to be able to offer it to all parts of the campaign, says Chris Wegrzyn, a database applications developer who served on the task force. Wegrzyn became the DNCs lead targeting developer and oversaw a series of costly acquisitions, all intended to free the party from the traditional dependence on outside vendors. The committee installed a Siemens Enterprise System phone-dialing unit that could put out 1.2 million calls a day to survey voters opinions. Later, party leaders signed off on a $280,000 license to use Vertica software from Hewlett-Packard that allowed their servers to access not only the partys 180-million-person voter file but all the data about volunteers, donors, and those who had interacted with Obama online. Many of those who went to Washington after the 2008 election in order to further the presidents political agenda returned to Chicago in the spring of 2011 to work on his relection. The chastening losses they had experienced in Washington separated them from those who had known only the ecstasies of 2008. People who did 08, but didnt do 10, and came back in 11 or 12they had the hardest culture clash, says Jeremy

Bird, who became national field director on the relection campaign. But those who went to Washington and returned to Chicago developed a particular appreciation for Wagners methods of working with the electorate at an atomic level. It was a way of thinking that perfectly aligned with their -simple theory of what it would take to win the president relection: get everyone who had voted for him in 2008 to do it again. At the same time, they knew they would need to succeed at registering and mobilizing new voters, especially in some of the fastest-growing demographic categories, to make up for any 2008 voters who did defect. Obamas campaign began the election year confident it knew the name of every one of the 69,456,897 Americans whose votes had put him in the White House. They may have cast those votes by secret ballot, but Obamas analysts could look at the Democrats vote totals in each precinct and identify the people most likely to have backed him. Pundits talked in the abstract about reassembling Obamas 2008 coalition. But within the campaign, the goal was literal. They would reassemble the coalition, one by one, through personal contacts Kyle Rush: Optimization at the Obama campaign: a/b testing http://kylerush.net/blog/optimization-at-the-obama-campaign-ab-testing/ By Kyle Rush December 12, 2012 Optimization was the name of the game for the Obama Digital team. We optimized just about everything from web pages to emails. Overall we executed about 500 a/b tests on our web pages in a 20 month period which increased donation conversions by 49% and sign up conversions by 161%. As you might imagine this yielded some fascinating findings on how user behavior is influenced by variables like design, copy, usability, imagery and page speed. What we did on the optimization team was some of the most exciting work I've ever done. I still remember the incredible traffic surge we got the day the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare. We had a queue of about 5 ready-to-go a/b tests that would normally take a couple days to get through, yet we finished them in just a couple hours. We had never expected a traffic surge like that. We quickly huddled behind Manik Rathee who happened to be the frontend engineer implementing experiments that dayand thought up new tests on the fly. We had enough traffic to get results on each test within minutes. Soon our colleagues from other teams gathered around us to see what the excitement was about. It was captivating to say the least. How we a/b tested Optimization was a science for us. We started off with a hypothesis and then we came up with several tests to prove (or disprove) it. For example, our hypothesis might be "less copy is better" and to prove that we would chose 5 areas of the site to remove copy. We used several tools to measure the affect. Optimizely for a/b tests, Google Analytics for general data gathering and the Blue State Digital tools to enhance or gut check our data. Sticking to a hypothesis was beneficial because it allowed us to retain focus on our goals. Of course not every a/b test followed this strategy, but we kept with it for the most part. Design and Interaction By June of 2012 our donate pages had undergone nearly 14 months of optimization. The low hanging fruit had been picked and it was difficult for variations to beat the control. We were working with a page that was engaging and had a low error rate, but it still looked like a long form. To solve that problem we started work on a variation that made the form look easier to complete. Our plan was to separate the field groups into four smaller steps so that users did not feel overwhelmed by the length of the form. Essentially the idea was to get users to the top of the mountain by showing them a small incline rather than a steep slope. We called this project Sequential because it turned our donate form into a sequenced process.

We had no idea if it would work. It was a gamble because it took a decent amount of development time, but we put our best foot forward. We placed the fields into four groups: amount, personal information, billing information and occupation/employer. We considered a number of factors to determine the order of the field groups, but the most persuasive was error rates. For months we had been tracking validation errors which occured when users submitted an invalid value in a form field (e.g. nothing in a required field or an improperly formatted email address). The occupation/employer fields generated the most errors because users would leave them blank even though they were requiredpeople don't like giving out information they think is unecessary. The billing field group produced the second most errors because it is hard for users to enter a 15-16 digit credit card correctly. Using this information we determined the field group order: 1. Donation amount, 2. Personal information, 3. Billing information and 4. occupation/employer. By putting the easier field groups first we not only lowered the engagement barrier (all you had to do was click a donation amount button to get started vs. typing your first name), but also to produce a sense of investment before users reached the difficult parts of the form. Our donate pages were responsive so we enabled the Sequential functionality on screen widths greater than 1023px to keep the mobile donation process as simple as possible. We used CSS animations to switch between field groups because they are visually smoother and much more performant than their JavaScript counterparts. Browsers that did not support CSS animations were given a JavaScript fallback. For a better experience with validation errors we used JavaScript to validate the fields in each field group when users clicked the next button. This made it easier for users to find and correct errors because they were looking at only a few form fields rather than all 16 at the same time. This also had the latent effect of lowering requests to our servers since we did not process the donation until all form fields were valid. We were very happy with the finished product because we felt like we had achieved our goal to make the donation form simpler, but how did it fare in a/b testing? By turning the long donation form into 4 smaller steps we increased the conversion rate by more than 5%. Turns out you can get more users to the top of the mountain if you show them a gradual incline instead of a steep slope. We began a/b testing the first iteration of Sequential on July 26th, 2012 and it replaced our standard donation form on August 7th. After vigorous optimization we ended up with what would almost be the final version of Sequential on August 7th. On November 1st we were delighted to see that our friends at the Romney campaign liked it so much. Copy It probably comes as no surprise that copy affects conversions. Lots of people are familiar with classic copy tests like this one. Like 37 Signals we had lots of success with altering the copy on our web pages. About halfway through the campaign we figured out that of all variables that affect user behavior (design, usability, imagery, etc.), copy has the highest ROI. This is because copy adjustments are just about the easiest change to make on a web page, yet they can produce some of the biggest gains. In late 2011 we launched a product called Quick Donate which made donating extremely fast and easy. Users who had Quick Donate could donate with a single click through email or on the web and even through SMS. The program was cutting edge because nobody had engineered donations through email before and at the time the Federal Election Commission did not allow political campaigns to use cell phone carrier short codes to raise money through text messages (the FEC later reversed this decision after Quick Donate launched). The programs was so successful that the stats behind it are kind of overwhelming. By the end of the campaign more 1.5 million Quick Donate users donated $115 million. Quick Donate users donated four times

as often and gave three times as much money. The program received a lot of optimization simply because of its success. There were two ways to sign up for Quick Donate. First, you could create a BarackObama.com account and then, in your account settings, save your billing information. The second way we designed to be much easier. After submitting a donation we gave users the option to create and account and save their credit card using the information they had just submitted with the donation. We called this the Quick Donate opt-in page and it received a lot of traffic since the campaign brought in tens of millions of donations. The page itself was very simple: Users with an existing account only needed to enter a password and users without an account only needed to create one. Underneath the password field was the option to enable SMS donations. We tested many variations of this page, but one of my favorites was when we adjusted the headline. The original headline of the pagewhich had not been tested at this pointread "Save your payment information for next time." That is pretty simple and straightforward and we definitely didn't want to make it longer. Our idea was to make the headline seem more connected to the donation that users had just made. Our new headline read "Now, save your payment information." The first headline made the Quick Donate opt-in seem disconnected from the donation while the second did exactly the opposite. By making the follow up ask more connected with the first ask, we increased conversions by 21%. As with Sequential, we were also delighted to see that the Romney campaign loved Quick Donate. Imagery Photography was a huge part of the Obama brand. We had several photographers that took lots of amazing photos of the President, the First Lady and everyone else. We took advantage of this by testing a ton of images. We tested photos just about everywhere from donate pages to sign up forms and about everywhere else you can imagine. As with layout and usability we learned a lot about how users react to different kinds of imagery. We found that there are many variables in photos that can affect conversions, but possibly the biggest impact had to do with the context in which the photo was used. Similar to the 2008 campaign, our splash page was the subject of a/b tests with different photos. Optimizing the splash page with a/b tests was a lot of fun because it received so much traffic that results came in quickly. One of the splash pages we ran was for a contest called Dinner with Barack. If you won, you got a free trip for yourself and a guest to have dinner with the President. To sweeten the deal even more the First Lady would be there dinner as well. If you want to see what you missed out on, you can still watch video from several of the dinners. We had so many great pictures of the previous Dinner with Barack contest that we wanted to see which performed the best. In the following test we had two photos. The first was a medium shot of the President at the dinner table, but it didn't have much context as you nothing else was in view/focus. Previous tests showed that large photos with focus on the President increased conversions. The second photo had a wider frame that revealed the First Lady and two dinner guests. We hoped that users would be more likely to convert if they could see just how close they would be sitting to the President of the United States during dinner. By changing the photo on the splash page we lifted conversions by more than 19%. Conclusion We knew from the beginning how valuable a/b testing could be in helping us achieve our goals and we took it seriously. We spent countless hours thinking critically about user psychology and implementing our ideas

with a/b tests. We had developers working around the clock to ensure that we always had an a/b test running. In looking at the overall results I think you could say our efforts paid off. We increased donation conversions by 49%, sign up conversions by 161% and we were able to apply our findings to other areas and products. However the affect our optimization efforts had on conversion rates was not the only benefit. Along the way we uncovered lots of interesting ways in which design, imagery, copy, usability and page speed affect user behavior. We were able to answer very specific questions like what kind of form input and label alignments are best for conversions and error rates. We were able to second guess our assumptions about how a web page should look and behave. We learned how to answer questions and we ended up with a treasure trove of best practices. Ad Age: Election Embeds: Facebook, Google Got Cozy With Campaigns http://adage.com/article/digital/election-embeds-facebook-google-cozy-campaigns/238693/ By Kate Kaye December 10, 2012 Big brands and agencies are used to lots of attention from Facebook and Google, so it's no surprise the presidential campaigns, with their vast ad budgets, got some, too. But as the election fades, Ad Age has learned more about just how closely the two largest sellers of digital advertising worked with the campaigns, even sending employees to work onsite at campaign offices and their respective digital consultancies. "Google staffers were hand-selected by Google to sit in our office and help us," confirmed Zac Moffatt, digital director for Mitt Romney's campaign. Multiple people who worked closely with the Barack Obama campaign did not respond to requests for interviews. "Facebook serviced both the Obama and Romney campaigns as closely as we would any big client," said a Facebook spokesman, though he declined to name or number the employees who worked for President Obama and Mr. Romney. Digital and social-media platforms, particularly Google and Facebook receive large portions of online political ad budgets. But they also require a new level of specialized expertise. The speed of political campaigning demands constant attention as messaging and targeting are adjusted on the fly. In addition, Google and Facebook frequently change aspects of their ad platforms, creating a desire for someone intricately familiar with them. Tradition of embedding The internet giants have a tradition of sending employees to work closely with advertisers and agencies, sometimes taking desks within the building. Google, for example, sent several employees to Procter & Gamble's Tide division as part of a talent exchange in 2008. "We've worked onsite with a number of clients and agencies to help them develop and implement their digital campaigns," said a Google spokeswoman. She declined to comment on similar relationships with political clients. But while the practice may be business-as-usual for consumer-packaged goods, this is a first for politics. It raises the question of just how much campaign data were Facebook and Google privy to. "How close are you going to let your vendors in?" said Eric Frenchman, who handled digital ad buys in 2008 for Sen. John McCain's digital consulting firm Connell Donatelli. He said Google did not work closely with the McCain campaign. "I guess I grew up in the old school, where your own data is your own data."

Added another consultant who's worked with Democratic and progressive groups: "I think it would raise eyebrows -- you're actually embedding people with a presidential campaign?" The Center for Responsive Politics declined to comment. It raises another question: Where does selling products and services end and strategic consulting begin? "It creates a very awkward situation," said an exec at an online ad network specializing in political ad buys. "Google has all this control over the pipeline of inventory and now they're getting potentially into the strategy and the spending decisions. I find that troubling." Big spenders Exactly how much money the Romney and Obama camps spent with Google and Facebook is not known. Both campaigns used outside firms to handle their online ad buys; Targeted Victory, a firm co-founded by Mr. Moffatt, did digital ad buys and other digital work for the Romney camp; Bully Pulpit Interactive did the same for the Obama camp. It's not clear that the 2012 presidential campaigns spent as much as the typical large commercial brand on Google or Facebook. By using these outside firms, campaigns avoid having to report the amount of money they paid to specific media outlets for ads or related services, making it easier to report their disbursements to the Federal Election Commission and providing less information for the prying eyes of media, campaign observers and opponents. They were required merely to report what they paid to the digital-media consultancies, despite the fact that Google and Facebook staffers were sometimes embedded in campaign offices rather than with the consulting firms. Google and Facebook executives told Ad Age the attention they gave the campaigns was normal for any big client in need of extra support. Still, Google worked with its lawyers to ensure work being done by embedded employees was done at the direction of Google. In 2012, Google and Facebook had separate salespeople dedicated either to Republicans, Democrats or Independent expenditure and advocacy groups -- aka Super PACs -- to ensure knowledge about media buys and spending plans didn't leak to opponents or, in the case of Super PACs, to like-minded groups that were legally prohibited from coordinating with the official candidate campaigns. Moreover, on the issue of partisanship, having Facebook and Google execs helping direct buys could potentially be concerning to the GOP, considering that top execs of both companies publicly support President Obama. Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg held a fundraiser for his re-election campaign at her home. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt was a special guest at a fundraiser for him. Jan Witold Baran, a partner at Wiley Rein, a law firm that specializes in election law, says the embeds are perfectly legal and chalks them up to old-fashioned hustling by new ad-sellers looking to grab campaign dollars. "I don't think that traditional media outlets are as proactive as some of these internet sites that sell advertising," he said. GigaOm: How Obamas data scientists built a volunteer army on Facebook http://gigaom.com/data/how-obamas-data-scientists-built-a-volunteer-army-on-facebook/ By Derrick Harris December 8, 2012 As voters increasingly spend their leisure time with things other than newspapers and television, political campaigns need new methods of making sure their messages reach those people. Obama for Americas Rayid Ghani took to Facebook to find not just possible voters, but possible campaign workers.

No matter how good your social media team is, the chances are its never done anything like this. Rather than just using Facebook as a channel for posting messages and tracking its followers feelings, the Obama for America data science team turned social media into a tool for efficiently recruiting the human resources it needed leading into the elections home stretch. The key was a model for determining who among its followers were the best messengers, who they might be able to persuade, and what actions they might be willing to take. So, rather than blast all of President Obamas 30 million Facebook fans or 20 million Twitter followers with the same plea for cash or neighborhood organizers, the campaign was able to make informed decisions about whom it asked for what, and how it asked them. During a recent interview, Obama for America Chief Scientist Rayid Ghani compared his teams social media approach in 2012 to the shift in web content from reposted print material to material designed for the web. For many organizations, he said, the prevailing strategy is I used to use email, and now Im just going to put the same information on a Facebook page. However, the presidents campaign used an abundance of online and offline data in order to hyper-personalize messages and get the most bang for its buck in terms of outreach. Essentially, Ghani explained, the campaign was able to match up supporters friends against voting lists and determine how it should approach supporters to reach their friends. If someone was going to spread a message to 20 people, the campaign wanted to ensure they reached 20 people most likely to take action in some way. Because Ghanis team had done so much work integrating its myriad data sets into a single view, it was better able to decide who could be most easily persuaded to vote for the first time, to donate money, to get active knocking on doors or perhaps even to switch sides. That it was coming from friends rather than the campaign was critical to the strategys success, too. The more local the contact is, Ghani said, the more likely *people+ are to take action. Changing times call for changing communications The effort to build an intelligent system like this was necessary because younger voters means of communication had shifted so greatly even since 2008. Then, Ghani explained, the Obama campaign relied primarily on phone calls and neighborhood canvassing in order to reach people. Now, many young people arent reachable on landlines at all, but they are always connected to some form of social media. Not that the presidents campaign abandoned those traditional methods, though. Ghani said many older voters are still best reached via non-digital means, and even when his team was using volunteers to reach those demographics, it suggested they give them a call or talk in-person. It really was all about what was most effective for each individual. Four years from now, however, Ghani sees a very different picture again in terms of how campaigns will reach their voters. Younger people will be even more difficult to reach via traditional telephones, and they might not even be watching a lot of over-the-air or cable television. On the other hand, he noted, older people will probably be more engaged online and perhaps with mobile apps, as well. Reaching *people+ through the channels theyre most engaged in is going to have to become mainstream *in political campaigns+, Ghani said. However, he reiterated, because theres only so much money to spend on any given medium, its more important to inform those interactions with voter intelligence than just to make them. Speaking about increasingly targeted online advertising, Ghani explained, You dont want to waste impressions on people

who are not in your target audience. If youre lactose-intolerant, theres no point in showing you ads for yogurt and dairy products. And even on the campaign trail, data was making a difference. Ghanis team wasnt writing speeches or managing communications, but it was helping the people who did those things do them better. For example, he explained, Matthew Rattigan, an analyst on the team, built a tool for looking at the coverage of speeches in local newspapers so it could break down by geographic region how people reacted and which parts were quoted most. Speechwriters were therefore able to see how the messages they wanted to convey were actually the ones that were covered. Very hard work, very short window Its pretty amazing to think about how much the Obama for America Tech team accomplished not just Ghanis data science team, but also CTO Harper Reeds unit and the team led by Chris Wegrzyn responsible for building the analytics and data infrastructure when you consider the short time frame in which they had to do it. Ghani considered himself lucky that he and his team inherited a handful of staff and techniques left over from the 2010 mid-term election, so the 2012 team didnt have to begin with the cupboards bare when it got to work in mid-2011. But, still, it had just a year and a half to recruit a team of data scientists (finding people who were qualified was extremely hard, Ghani said) and to get some foundational data-management systems in place. The campaigns targeted outreach efforts on Facebook, for example, only got up and running in August following an extensive effort to integrate the campaigns myriad online and offline data sources. Our biggest challenge this time around was getting all the *online and offline+ data together in one place, Ghani said. We were basically a political campaign with the problems of a large enterprise. However, he added, corporate data architecture is an ongoing concern they dont build systems for one-off jobs then abandon them. Given all that work, he thinks it would be a shame to let it go when the next presidential campaign team is built. Not that what it did will still be totally relevant four or even two years from now. Data sources will change, as will technology, but having something in place is better than nothing. This is especially true considering how little budget campaigns typically have between elections to focus on technology. Absent an abundance of money and the right people during election season, Ghani said, You need to make sure you have people whose job it is to be thinking about this stuff all the time. Thats because although the work Ghanis team wasnt enough to win an election on its own, it was very important. And in tight elections, any competitive edge is worth having (while failures can have harsh consequences). Reaching the right voters at the right time with the right message will become even more important in future elections, he said, and we only scratched the surface of it. NY Mag: Noble Nerds http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/obama-nerds-2012-12/ By Jason Zengerle December 7, 2012 The race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, Politico declared in June, was a grinding, joyless slog, falling short in every respect of the larger-than-life personalities and debates of the 2008 campaign, and neither candidate did much in the ensuing months to elevate the contest. Yet now, a month after the election, Obamas campaign team has managed to cast a 2008-like hue on their 2012 victory.

The secret of their successful spin: Instead of talking about how their guy won a second term by methodically definingand demonizinghis buffoon of an opponent, theyre gushing about the ingenuity of their apps and algorithms. The new story line began to emerge the day after the election, when Times Michael Scherer wrote in a postmortem that the presidents team showed that the role of the campaign pros in Washington who make decisions on hunches and experience is rapidly dwindling, being replaced by the work of quants and computer coders who can crack massive data sets for insight. Similar stories soon followed in the New York Times and Bloomberg Businessweek, among other publications. By the time politicos and reporters gathered in Cambridge late last month for Harvards quadrennial Campaign Decision Makers Conference, it was Obamanauts like digital director Teddy Goff and field director Jeremy Birdnot David Axelrod and Jim Messinawho were treated like rock stars. The analytics operation was awesome through this campaign, Jim Margolis, Obamas ad maker, told the gathering. We should be doing shout-outs all day long for Teddy and all the people who were really looking at this. The Revenge of the Obama Nerds narrative does have the benefit of being true. Just like reporters, Obamas supporters werent nearly as enthusiastic as theyd been four years ago, but thanks in large part to the geeks who were obsessively testing which e-mail subject lines netted the most donations (Hey was surprisingly lucrative) and studying Americans viewing habits to figure out how to best target campaign ads (TV Land turned out to be a voter gold mine), his campaign in 2012 was still able to raise more money and turn out more volunteers than in 2008. In fact, the tech side was the only part of the Obama operation that could credibly be framed as a throwback to the old Hope and Change: Despite the slash-and-burn quality of the Obama reelection campaign as seen by Americas television viewers, the presidents 33 million Facebook fans were experiencing a whole different campaign that was largely positive, Goff explained at Harvard. What they were experiencing was this uplifting stuff about supporting the middle class, about fighting for education, and that kind of thing. And when you consider that Obamas Facebook fans were themselves friends with 98 percent of Facebook users in the U.S.Thats more than the number of people who vote, Goff saidthen the Obamanauts can plausibly argue that, for many Obama voters, maybe 2012 wasnt that different from 2008 after all. Even more important, the nerd narrative gives the Obamanauts hope for the future. After their historic victory in 2008, they predicted that their candidate was so amazing that he could single-handedly transform Washington by sheer force of will. That obviously didnt come to pass. But now they are making similar predictionsnot because of their man but because of their machine. Luckily for us, I dont see anyone on the Republican side who understands what we did, Bird told me in Cambridge before going on to explain not only his grand designs of electing another Democrat president in 2016, but also for turning Texas blue. WSJ: Obamas Campaign Used Salesforce.com To Gauge Feelings of Core Voters http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2012/12/07/obamas-campaign-used-salesforce-com-to-gauge-feelings-of-corevoters/ By Joel Schectman December 7, 2012 To organize millions of emails and messages through its website, the reelection campaign of President Barack Obama utilized cloud based software commonly used by businesses to manage their sales contacts. With turnout for the presidential election expected to be far lower than the historic highs of 2008, Obama for America needed to make sure its core supporters stayed engaged with the campaign.

That technology, from Salesforce.com, tracked the 5.7 million messages as many as 80,000 per day received by email, phone and through the campaigns website. To sort through the messages and get questions routed to the right staffer in the campaigns sprawling organization, the system automatically created tags from words in the inquirieslike polling or contribution, said Vivek Kundra, executive vice president for emerging markets at Saleforce.com. Kundra previously served as the first CIO of the federal government, from 2009 to 2011. The tool allowed the campaign to keep its finger on the pulse of some of the valuable core decided-voter group that reached out to the campaign, at a time when Democrats feared turnout would be much lower than in 2008. The tool scoured messages for keywords such as healthcare or education, and displayed issues on a dashboard campaign staffers could look at to figure out what concerns or questions were surging in citizen correspondences with the campaign. The dashboard also allowed staffers to look at what issues were trending by state, city or town, allowing the campaign to adapt its ground game in real time, according to Kundra. Those insights could help staff in the field that had mobile versions of the dashboard. *The platform allowed] the campaign to aggregate sentiment in real time and [gave it] the ability to and mobilize people in the field, Kundra said. The campaign spent around $155,000 on Salesforce.coms collaboration and social network monitoring tool, according to campaign finance disclosures. In all, it spent more than $8.3 million on technology products and services from technology vendors. If online advertising is included, the number totals $82,579,701. Salesforce declined to comment on the size of the deal. In a statement provided to CIO Journal by Salesforce, Michael Slaby, chief information and innovation officer for the disbanded campaign, said: Key to the campaigns success was a technology platform that allowed us to engage with constituents and make data-driven decisions in real time. Katie Hogan, a spokeswoman for the disbanded campaign, declined to comment beyond the release. Kundra joined Salesforce seven months after leaving government service. PDF: From Hope To Forward | Ethan Roeder VIDEO: http://personaldemocracy.com/media/%E2%80%9C-hope-forward%E2%80%9D-ethan-roeder December 6, 2012 PDF: From Hope To Forward | Catherine Bracy VIDEO: http://personaldemocracy.com/media/%E2%80%9C-hope-forward-catherine-bracy December 6, 2012 PDF: From Hope To Forward | Teddy Goff VIDEO: http://personaldemocracy.com/media/%E2%80%9C-hope-forward%E2%80%9D-teddy-goff December 6, 2012 PDF: From Hope To Forward | Betsy Hoover VIDEO: http://personaldemocracy.com/media/%E2%80%9C-hope-forward%E2%80%9D-betsy-hoover December 6, 2012 Obama Digital Org http://www.p2012.org/candidates/obamaorg.html#digital Last updated December 5, 2012 Commentary: Is The GOP Digital Team (Still) In Denial? http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/12/07/is-the-gop-digital-team-still-in-denial/

By Bethany Mandel December 7, 2012 In this months issue of COMMENTARY, Benjamin Domenech has an excellent article on the Republicans broken technological machine. In it he explains why the Romney digital team was unable to catch up to Obamas record-setting digital team that many have likened to Big Brother in its scope. Domenech contends, and I agree, that even taking the strength of Obamas digital team into account, the Romney campaign didnt scratch the surface of what they should have accomplished on the digital front. The issues of the Romney campaign were varied and are not only due to the failure of Project Orca. Domenech explains: While digital efforts were the primary focus of the Obama campaign from the beginning, with data miners and tech gurus culled from Silicon Valley, they were a relatively late addition to the Romney effort. Its digital operation was staffed after the rest of the campaign, with an operation that seemed remarkably inefficient for a campaign that was supposed to do things with the rigor of Romneys research-intensive firm, Bain Capital. There were plenty of people working on the digital side, but tasks were poorly assigned and hampered by restrictive approval processes. Romneys staff was politically diverse and more used to the world of business than politicssome had never worked on a political campaign before. Frustration set in, then boredom, then Facebook-browsing. The quiet was deafening. For digital staffers who recognized they were playing catch-up with the Obama machine that had never stopped building after 2008, the contrasts were infuriating. Where the Obama campaigns content and emails were tailored to the interests of individually targeted demographic communities based on topics of interest and other data-mined priorities, Romneys campaign didnt even make distinctions between whether someone had given $5 or $500, or whether the name came to the database through a petition about health care or energy policy. The campaign was also fiercely hierarchical, to the surprise of some longtime Romney staffers who found their ideas for innovation shunted aside by senior staff and consultants who were unapproachable and unresponsive. Late last month RedStates Erick Erickson had a stinging post on the incestuous and unproductive relationship between consultants and the Romney campaign, contending that a group of consultants were the seeds of Mitt Romneys ruin and the RNCs get out the vote (GOTV) effort collapsed bled to death by charlatan consultants making millions off the party, its donors, and the grassroots. Unfortunately, with a few exceptions, it appears that his advice on the usefulness of these consultants has more or less fallen on deaf ears. Yesterday a private meeting (which was immediately reported on by sources present) took place between some members of Romneys digital team and other major conservative digital strategists. It appears that many found it to be a positive and uplifting experience, and that discussing the enormous gap between the two sides didnt overwhelm or discourage those present. Roll Call reported that One source said the meeting was so positive that it was almost as if Romney had won. That attitude calls to mind the overconfidence that marked most of the Romney campaign, especially after the first debate. In Domenechs piece he quotes Romney pollster Neil Newhouse, who announced boldly in a staff meeting, Were fing gonna win this thing. The digital divide between the two sides is not insurmountable, but it should not be filling anyone in the conservative movement with anything resembling confidence either. The fact that this meeting left many leaving feeling positive is a worrisome indication that

the consultants and strategists who underestimated their ability to compete with the Obama campaign are still living in an alternate reality. Triangulation: Harper Reed Interview http://twit.tv/show/triangulation/81 December 5, 2012 CNN: Gut Check Moffatt and Bleeker Interview http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/12/05/cnns-gut-check-for-december-5-2012/ By Ashley Killough December 5, 2012 As youre reading Gut Check, were wrapping up an afternoon panel with some of the most respected leaders in the political social media space. Theyre gathered here in Washington at Exploring the 2012 Digital Election, an event sponsored by Google and CNN. Mark just finished talking with Andrew Bleeker, senior strategist for Obama for America, and Zac Moffatt, digital director for Romney for President, about using the rapidly evolving tools of the Internet to persuade voters and get the message out beyond traditional television ads and direct mail. With online outreach becoming an increasingly sizable part of campaign budgets, digital directors now play a key role in campaign strategy. Bleeker and Moffatt, two pioneers in the field, provided their unique, insider perspectives on how to put the campaign trail into the digital realm and what may change in the future. Here are our five takeaways: 1.) Its all about investing early: Both practitioners acknowledged that Obamas campaign had a huge advantage, given that the digital team already had an infrastructure in place from the previous election. Moffatt said it would have been helpful to build their digital team further ahead of the time before Romney won the GOP nomination. When they ramped, as he called it, and went from a primary to general election campaign, Moffatt had to expand staff and resources at an exponential rate. But it wasnt just Moffatt who realized the benefit of investing early. Even though Bleeker was on the winning team, he said if they had to do it all over again, wed spend twice as much early on. 2.) You have to persuade, not just organize: In 2008, Bleeker said social media was a convenient platform to mobilize supporters. The biggest change this cycle, he said, was realizing that persuasion had to be front and center in social media, not just in advertising but in convincing the electorate who to vote for. In other words, a candidate may be able to show popularity on a Facebook or Twitter page through the number of likes, but if those likes dont translate into votes, online campaigns will only go so far. 3.) Social media has become more efficient: Moffatt and Bleeker agreed that social media platforms have made it possible for campaigns to be more persuasive. By building applications that allow for fundraising and more interaction between the campaigns and voters, social media has become more meaningful, Bleeker said. 4.) Its about quality, not quantity: Part of what makes the interaction more meaningful is the ability to microtarget, the two rival digital strategists said. Moffatt said the Romney campaign was able to use geolocation on Facebook, where it could post relevant messages in respective areas. We were doing 40 to 50 posts a day that most people didnt see because they were showing up in targeted areas, he said. 5.) Online has a longer life cycle than TV messaging: With television ads, a commercial may run for only a few days, but those same ads can live online indefinitely. After tallying up the number of times people played

Romney ads online, people collectively spent 417 years watching their commercials online, Moffatt said. And according to Charles Scrase, Googles head of elections, viewers are twice as likely to remember a message if they see it both online and on television. National Journal: Obama, Romney Digital Advisers Talk Shop http://www.nationaljournal.com/blogs/techdailydose/2012/12/obama-romney-digital-advisers-talk-shop-05 By Adam Mazmanian December 5, 2012 Barack Obamas digital team got the better of the Republican online operation in most respects, but Romney Digital Director Zac Moffatt had the edge in one key metric--talking on the record to reporters. Moffatt explained his press strategy in a campaign postmortem hosted by Google and moderated by CNNs Mark Preston on Wednesday. While it was helpful to the campaign to have news of its digital operations out there for donors and supporters, the real point of Moffatts musings was to keep the Obama campaigns digital team guessing. Team Obama was paying attention, said Andrew Bleeker, a senior digital strategist for the Obama campaign. Romneys Facebook ad strategy was among the biggest question marks for the Obama team. The Republican nominee spent heavily on Facebook ads nationwide to boost his follower numbers. Obama outspent the GOP ticket only in a few key swing states. The reason, said Moffatt, was that the Romney team was under pressure to try to compete with Obamas huge social-media advantage. The low-hanging fruit was still there, in terms of list-building and follower acquisition, he said. Additionally, Romneys Facebook following was highly engaged, and Moffatt was able to spin those engagement numbers in the press. By contrast, Obamas digital team maintained a Dont talk about Fight Club culture, Bleeker said. In the aftermath of the election, news of how the Obama team tested its fundraising e-mails and honed its social media pitch is emerging. As early voting started, for instance, the Obama team used splashy takeover ads on big sites in battleground states, like the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, to encourage and track early voting. It couldnt have been more central to our campaign, Bleeker said. The Obama campaign was able to drive phenomenal early vote lookups through digital targeted advertising, he said. Obamas digital team was able to apply intelligence from their 2008 effort to the 2012 election, but they faced new challenges, including an increased reliance on social media as a channel. Bleeker cited the problem of getting social-media followers to take part in offline activity, such as canvassing in a battleground state or helping out in a field office. Some supporters were happy to just like something on Facebook, or share it with their networks. That doesnt get us where we need to go, Bleeker said. The Romney campaign is bequeathing its digital legacy to the Republican National Committee. That legacy includes e-mail addresses and other data on 1 million new donors. Whatever we do in 2013 and beyond, the party is in a stronger place, he said. On Thursday, Moffatt and other leading Republican campaign operatives will make this pitch to party digital specialists behind closed doors at an RNC event, where tougher questions are likely to be posed. Moffatt said that presidential aspirants would be well advised to start early, cast a wide net for talent, and go big with a large dedicated digital team. If I could do it again, he said, Id do it as an incumbent.

The Hill: Romney's Digital Director Talks Lessons Learned http://thehill.com/blogs/twitter-room/other-news/271307-romneys-digital-director-talks-lessons-learned By Alicia M. Cohn December 5, 2012 President Obama's re-election campaign ran "the greatest digital operation in the history of politics," Zac Moffatt, digital director for Mitt Romney, said Wednesday. "I don't begrudge them." In contrast, Moffatt said he thinks his team struggled the most with the rapid need to "scale out" and staff up following the extended GOP primary. "Build bigger" is his advice when it comes to digital teams for future presidential campaigns. "We ran out of runway," he said, and described his dream scenario as one where he could put together a dream team of people at least two years in advance. "If I could do it again, I'd do it as an incumbent," he laughed. With the election over, digital strategists for both presidential campaigns seemed more than willing to put any animosity behind them at a panel co-hosted by CNN and Google in Washington, DC. Andrew Bleeker, senior online strategist to the Obama campaign, participated in the same panel. "We never really set out to run a digital campaign but we set out to run an efficient campaign," he said, explaining that "individual decisions" were made regarding which methods best suited different strategies rather than setting aside a percentage of the budget for digital. Moffatt said some of his energy during the campaign was devoted to pushing back against the narrative that Republicans don't use the Internet well. "We needed to show after 2008 that we as a party were investing in [digital and online data]," he said. Although many GOP operatives compare the Romney campaign's digital strategy unfavorably to the Obama campaign's, Moffatt said he thinks "the party's in a much stronger place going forward." He referred in part to the "legacy item" of more than a million donor names the campaign handed over to the Republican National Committee this week that are brand new to the RNC. In contrast, Bleeker described the attitude toward the digital strategy within the Obama campaign as "a 'don't talk about Fight Club' culture." Obama's digital team has only begun to share details of their strategy and the infrastructure that accomplished it post-election. "I think we built a whole new campaign infrastructure that didn't exist before," Bleeker acknowledged. Moffatt said building in-house "wasn't an option for us," due to the time constraints, and admitted that made the Romney team very "vendor-centric." One possible consequence of that structure has been identified as the failure of Project ORCA, a web-based app meant to coordinate volunteers that crashed in deployment on Election Day. Moffatt said the digital team did not have anything to do with building the application. Bleeker stepped in to defend Romney's team on ORCA, saying he thinks the role the app played in possibly tamping down voter turnout is "vastly" over-hyped.

"While we did find it kind of funny, it wasn't that amusing because the same thing happened to us in '08," he noted, referring to Project Houdini. "We won anyway." He also complimented Moffatt on building an audience "very quickly" online, acknowledging the time advantage for Team Obama. He joked that a "good way to figure out who's running" in 2016 is to pay attention to who is building up digital infrastructure now. Bleeker recommended that any potential candidates start early building tools like QuickDonate, email lists, and social media followers. Bleeker said the biggest lesson his team learned during the campaign was to "test everything." "And be flexible, go with what works best not what looks best" or seems best, he said. The campaign has already revealed that email fundraising pitches generated some of their biggest revenue this cycle, and often the email content that got the best response was the content the team would least expect. Post-election, Bleeker returns to his digital marketing firm, Bully Pulpit Interactive, and Moffatt to his, Targeted Victory. CNN: Early Vote Central To Digital Campaign http://youtu.be/wkonZojIfiQ December 5, 2012 MP: Andrew always seems to win. So Andrew what I want to do now is hand you the moderator mike, and I want you to ask the question youve always wanted to ask Zac about Romneys operation but you dont know, heres your chance. AB: Vanity metrics. What were you doing with the Facebook advertising? What were your goals from a Facebook perspective? Just for reference for some of the group, one of the slides that was shown when we walked in here was this map that CNN produced, which we were discussing right before, where you will see, most of the states there was more discussion about Romney than about Obama, except the battleground states, those were blue. So we were really actually wondering on the campaign, are they investing in nonbattleground states? Why? Is the conversation going to carry over? And should we? ZM: Well I think one of the things that we looked at, we looked at the Facebook environment. We were feeling a lot of pressure because Obamas lists were so large and that was just the reality. There was somehow this myth that somehow because Obama had 25 million people on Facebook, 30 million people on Facebook, they couldnt lose. Same on Twitter. We kind of had this glib thing, with Twitter followers Justin Beiber would be the next President of the United States. That was kind of something internal but then we really started to think about it and there was this narrative that we kept coming back to: having the largest lists didnt make you the best digital team and thats something we kind of looked at again and again. We also had to come up with, our Facebook strategy with limited resources and we suddenly it became that we had a lot of resources. We looked at it and said that we have 6 months, what do we build? And we had to build an audience, because an audience is something we wanted to build out. So some of the things you started to see in target states was very fundraising or list-building specifics. What that allows you to do, when you call from home, you would ideally have someone in that state calling someone else in that state. But in this case, if there were some states where we didnt have a large presence, they were going to generate a lot of phone calls and we kind of knew that so we were looking for people to do that. We also felt when we were looking at the metrics, the low hanging fruit was still there, we really got to the point where we felt we had to start national advertising because there were still people to be brought in. Again I think with re-elect you would probably take a different strategy, and we were looking at that. I think when we were looking at the metrics as well it was kind of funny the things people focused on again and again. Talking about this became such an easy number for us, we were saying the same amount of people were

engaging online despite the fact that there were 3, and at the very end there were 3, times larger. Earlier in the process they were 20 times larger. And that was one of the things we looked at and it really came through to us with the Supreme Court ruling. We had about 2.3 million people on our Facebook page, they had about 27 million. 40% likes, comments, shares that day of the audience that day participated on our page. We went through and counted everything. We went through theres and counted everything we could see and they were at about 3%. And we said look, this is a message that the media will understand. Its taking digital and being able to tell us, and thats important because you have to be able to explain what youre doing to people in terms that are kind of universal. When you say to someone, look they have 25 million, but their guys are just not that engaged, theyre not doing these efforts and so we had to go to that again and again. And I think in some ways it must have worked. Every time I get a heat tweet from an Obama person it mentions a vanity measure, so I know I pushed some buttons somewhere that really got to people. Not only because we had to have this narrative because again me as an outsider in 2008 working on a team?, it was so frustrating understanding that Amazon doesnt care if youre Democrat or Republican when you buy a book, Google doesnt care, the internet is everywhere. And thats one of the problems, people thought that Republicans werent using the Internet, so we had to fight back and start to put these markers down to say no, this is what we think. MP: Whats nice about this Do you want to respond? AB: We took note that, you guys built an audience very quickly and it was very engaged. And the reason I asked the question is because we had the conversation, do we need to care? ZM: And the interesting thing, we were really surprised by, back to this, we built two audiences. We built Mitt Romney but we did another 5 million for Paul Ryan. We were surprised, it was like Joe Biden didnt exist, it was like the cousin in the corner. Its almost like they decided one guy is running and the other guy is there. And thats the way we looked at it. We were like, why arent they doing anything there? We would have more people talking about Paul Ryan in a day then they would have in a month sometimes, when it wasnt big and it got big at the end. And I dont say that, I understand what their brand is, and I dont, Michelle Obama was a huge brand too. Trust me, we get all of the points to that you were putting together. And that was one of the things about the map. If you mapped Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan together it was on many days larger, even in the battleground states, than Obama. And we thought that was also something because we thought Paul Ryan, from a digital perspective, brought a different point of view and a different set of volunteers, so we would say different things to them. MP: Zac given the fact that you lost the election and the coin toss, Im not going to let you ask a question. Nah Im kidding, go ahead. And you know what, lets open it up, you can get right into his personal life. Lets get him while you can. ZM: I think my question for Andrew is, a lot of what we thought, when we looked at their advertising buy, I think, some of the challenges we saw was that it had more of an eye to media than sometimes to efficiency and I think thats something weve talked about. Theres a certain amount of your budget, maybe 5%, that you just call the like, ok Im just going to let this go because I want to keep the rest of my budget. But we thought sometimes when you did like, state takeovers, even when you did the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, the day of the early voting, which I thought was interesting, but its funny because I saw you guys like, driving more reporters to talk about it, because it was a national buy, youre buying instead of like, geo-locational. Because everything we hear from Team Obama is all that geo-locational, if it doesnt matter in that state, it doesnt matter, and then they would go out there and pump there chest and said you can see it. Another thing we were looking at was, was that on purpose the way you were looking at it, as much earned media as it was, or were you actually seeing the results that justified these larger bids? Like every primary, we saw you coming to every state, and we knew that. Thats why, if you guys were watching the Dem convention,

we bought the inside banners and pointed to them and said Obama isnt working, just because we knew it would annoy them. It was like a $1500 buy that made me so happy to be like, man theyre going to be so pissed today when they see this. AB: Haha yes, good question. No question we bought the Des Moines Register on Iowa primary day and the Manchester Union Leader, stuff like that, that was definitely good for me. But we definitely havent gotten better and, you guys saw that, how we covered the Iowa thing, and I think we got more play on that, and honestly probably donations from it because more people went to the site to click on it than Ive ever seen from any kind of media buy. But I do think that stuff was just kind of throw away, it was cheap. The early vote stuff couldnt have been more essential to our campaign. We knew we were winning the campaign preElection Day. When all of a sudden we can look at the folks that voted early, they started to line up with our turnout models and we felt pretty good. So we spent a large proportion of our actual budget on what I called field support or mobilization and much of it was driving to some metric, so the takeovers did do that. They were expensive but not that big a piece of stuff where we could actually find out, ok, we had to come up with some metric. The challenge with early voting is that theres a lag in reporting between when somebody you know, same thing with absentee ballots, theres a lag between when the voter profile says somebody voted and when they actually voted, so it takes a while to sort of to see what your real ROI is, but we were actually able to drive a phenomenal number of early vote lookups, vote by mail applications through digital targeted advertising. Business Insider: Michigan Supreme Court Judge Says Facebook Campaign Won Her Election http://www.businessinsider.com/michigan-supreme-court-judge-bridget-mccormacks-facebook-electioncampaign-2012-12#ixzz2EHfAuVKT By Jim Edwards December 5, 2012 Democrat Bridget Mary McCormack believes Facebook -- specifically about $51,000 of Facebook ads -- won her a seat on the Michigan State Supreme Court. She got 1.53 million votes, beating Republican incumbent Stephen Markman for the first place finish even though Markman spent $1 million in attack ads on TV, via a Washington, D.C., conservative advocacy group called "Judicial Crisis Network." The ads only ran in heavy rotation a few days before the vote, according to Ad Age: ... the campaign ultimately had a half-dozen Facebook ads in circulation in the five days leading up to Nov. 6 after a brief testing window to find which performed best for different age and gender groups. All had positive messages (noting that Ms. McCormack had been endorsed by 10 Michigan newspapers, for example) with the aim of boosting recognition of her name by Election Day. There were other factors: McCormack was endorsed by local newspapers and her sister, "West Wing" actress Mary McCormack recorded an ad endorsing her. But her campaign media buyer says Facebook made the difference. Ad Age: Michigan Supreme Court Campaign Credits Facebook Ads With Margin of Victory http://adage.com/article/campaign-trail/michigan-supreme-court-campaign-credits-facebook-ads/238604/ By Cotton Delo December 4, 2012 What tipped the scales in favor of a candidate for the Michigan Supreme Court in a closely run election? Her campaign team surmises that a heavy helping of Facebook ads during the home stretch of the race played an outsize role.

Democrat Bridget Mary McCormack was ultimately the top vote-getter in a field of seven candidates running for two full-term seats on the bench. Her roughly 1.53 million votes edged out the other winner, Republican incumbent Stephen Markman, by more than 30,000 votes. (The first and second runners-up had roughly 1.4 million votes apiece.) Ms. McCormack's campaign manager, Jon Hoadley, finds her margin of victory all the more surprising because of the onslaught on negative TV ads paid for by a Washington, D.C.-based group called the Judicial Crisis Network that were aimed at Ms. McCormack, a University of Michigan law professor, during the final week of the campaign. (The ad featured the mother of a deceased American soldier and homed in on Ms. McCormack's offer to represent Guantanamo detainees.) While the Judicial Crisis Network was filling the airwaves in Detroit and Grand Rapids with $1 million worth of attack ads, Ms. McCormack's team was spending liberally on Facebook. Mr. Hoadley estimates that 51% of the campaign's $100,000 ad budget was allocated to Facebook, and 80% of that sum was spent in the final five days with the intent of burning the candidate's name into liberal voters' brains. (Ms. McCormack also benefited from TV ads run by the Michigan Democratic State Central Committee to support its slate, made up of her and two other candidates.) "Repetition over a short period of time really did make a difference," said Mr. Hoadley. Doubling down on Facebook for the final stretch was more of an accident than a strategy, according to Josh Koster, managing partner of the digital agency Chong & Koster, which handled the buy for Ms. McCormack's campaign. Due to time constraints, it wasn't feasible to execute a diversified strategy that included display and search ads, he said. Instead, the campaign ultimately had a half-dozen Facebook ads in circulation in the five days leading up to Nov. 6 after a brief testing window to find which performed best for different age and gender groups. All had positive messages (noting that Ms. McCormack had been endorsed by 10 Michigan newspapers, for example) with the aim of boosting recognition of her name by Election Day. While Mr. Koster notes that efforts on behalf of the Democratic slate helped bring Ms. McCormack to within striking distance, he thinks the Facebook ads must have been the ultimate needle-mover. "[They're] the only thing that could have moved her to being ahead of everyone else from being tied with every else," he said. However, in the absence of scientific exit-polling data, there are other possibilities. One other differentiator for the campaign was celebrity, since Ms. McCormack's actress sister Mary McCormack rallied fellow former cast members from "The West Wing" to record a four-minute YouTube video on the candidate's behalf. (It was linked to in one of the Facebook ads and racked up more than a million views.) Another possibility is that the heavy dose of TV attack ads targeting Ms. McCormack had the unintended effect of causing voters to remember her in a technically nonpartisan race where name recognition was crucial, since candidates' party affiliations weren't presented on the ballot. "The ad could definitely have [had] a potential outcome of increasing her name identification, and also making individuals inclined to support her due to the outlandishness of the claim," said Mr. Hoadley in an email. New Media Rockstars: Obama's Social Media Strategist Talks To NMR About Being The Voice Of The President http://newmediarockstars.com/2012/12/obamas-social-media-strategist-talks-to-nmr-about-being-the-

voice-of-the-president-interview/ By Carly Lanning December 4, 2012 On the night of the election, after receiving confirmation of President Obamas victory, Laura Olin and her social media team uploaded a photo that would become one of the most memorable photos in American history. Titled Four More Years, the iconic photograph of a content-looking President Obama hugging his wife Michelle has since become the symbol for the presidents re-election win. Olin began her position as Outbound Director for the Obama for America campaign in March 2011 and has since become the driving force behind the presidents social media presence. Having only met the president a few brief times beforehand, Olin came into the re-election campaign with the challenge of bringing the personalities and passions of the president, first lady and vice president into the social media world. Just as television changed the way the public viewed politics in the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon election, this year, President Obama and Governor Romney went head to head both at the podium and online. Olin says: Social media had a huge influence in helping us get out the vote, raise money and persuade people to support the president. No matter what platforms emerge in the next four years, I think political campaigns will have to find ways to become a part of the way people are having conversations online in a way people will respond to. In a political campaign where as much of the action happened in the debates as between Twitter accounts, Olin enlisted a team of four to help run President Obamas, First Lady Michelle Obamas and Vice President Bidens Facebooks, Twitters, Tumblrs, Spotifys and Instagrams. During this election, 60% of voters between the ages of 18-29 voted for Obama. A lot of those voters got political news and information from Facebook and Twitter. In the end, Obamas social media campaign trounced Romneys, with the breakdowns as follows: On Facebook, Obamas page aquired 31 million likes versus Romneys page with 11 million likes; on Twitter, Obama stands at 24 million followers while Romney has a following of 1.7 million; on Tumblr, each of President Obamas posts acquired an average of 70,000 notes while a single Romney post averaged around 400 notes. Olin says: I only met *President Obama+ briefly a couple of times *and+ the day after the campaign, when he came to Chicago HQ, he went around the office and hugged every single person there and there were hundreds of us. Election night was one of the happiest of my life; I felt proud of everything our team had done but mostly relieved that the president would get a second term and that wed continue making progress on issues we cant afford to go back on now. So what can we take away from the success of President Obamas campaign? Olin advises: One, hire people who are not just good at their jobs, but who also share the sensibility youre trying to convey with your organization. Tone is everything on social media. Two, images will beat just text or video embeds almost every time. [And] three, this is so simple, but people are much more likely to share things if you ask them to share them. We did that a lot, because we knew that people getting campaign messages from their friends was so much more powerful than them getting campaign messages directly from us.

Now winding down after the election, Olin is continuing to run the Presidents social media campaign and says she is currently focusing on rallying grassroots movements against raising middle class taxes and providing support in the fight over the fiscal cliff. Slate: "The Socially Awkward Do It Better" http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2012/12/rootscamp_meet_the_hip_geeks_who_ beat_mitt_romney_and_helped_barack_obama.single.html By David Weigel December 3, 2012 Near the end of August, when it was stubbornly behind President Obama in the polls, Mitt Romneys campaign released a TV ad about the gutting of welfares work requirements. The killer verb came from a Richmond Times-Dispatch editorial: Welfare Reform GUTTED, adapted and splayed across the screen in a font size usually reserved for stuff like Nixon Resigns or Japan Surrenders. On Saturday, I sat in one of the Washington Convention Centers dark and anonymous meeting rooms and learned just how badly that ad had failed. The lesson was part of RootsCamp, an annual post-election conference of Democratic/progressive campaigners put on by the New Organizing Institute. My teachers were media trackers from the Democratic National Committee, young quants who repeatedly, politely pleaded with reporters to keep quotes and hard numbers off the record. They did share two maps. The first one showed the media markets where the gutting ad ranVirginia and some spillover in Maryland and North Carolina, colored in faded purple to measure the impact. The second showed the states where media coverage informed voters that the ad was false. Purple-mountained majesty spread from coast to coast, with states far outside the Romney ad zone learning of, then loathing, the Romney message. Why didnt anybody else get that at the time? The titles of the next slide answered my question. We can get outspent and still win. Media doesnt understand how media works. So, Democrats outsmarted the Romney campaign. The Republican had more money and won plenty of news cycles. (He outspent Obama in every swing state except Ohio.) Republican super PACs raised more than their Democratic counterparts. The GOP claimed to double or triple its voter contacts in key states. Democrats won anyway, because theyd figured out whom to spend money on, and how. RootsCamp might be the first political conference Ive been to where some people wore purely ironic buttonsRomney-Ryan swag, tributes to a forever-vanquished enemy. Most mega-meetings in downtown D.C. bring an alien-looking group of Americans dressed in comfy convention clothes or black suits. The RootsCamps crowd, 2,000 strong, looked like the casting pool for a party scene on Girls. There was no glossy schedule. Activists learned of panels and breakout talks by checking a smartphone app or visiting The Wall, a monolith decorated with 8-by-11 titles and descriptions. Among them: Inglorious Voters, #whitepeopleproblems, and Unfuck Fostercare. On the third floor, any victorious activist still looking for a job could meet potential employers. On the first floor, he could meet with his peers from Obama for America or MoveOn and discover what cheap tricks had bested the rich guys. On Friday, they packed the room for a panel titled This Shit Actually Works, where MoveOn revealed the results of a voter turnout experiment demo-ed in Delawares sleepy September primary. MoveOn wanted to test what sort of generic-looking mail was most effective for getting a possible voter off the coucha best

practices appeal to their civic duty or social pressure that compared a voter with his neighbors. Daniel Mintz showed the crowd an old attempt at social pressure, a list of neighbors and their scores that looked like crap. Then he revealed MoveOns voter report card. Featuring smiling stock-photo children, it revealed how often the target had voted and how often his neighbors had voted. Turnout for the control group was control 19.3 percent, Mintz revealed. Turnout for best practices was 21.5 percent. Among people who got the social pressure mail, turnout was 22.8 percent. The point wasnt really to convince new voters to choose Obama. It was to activate the soft voters who Democrats knew were out there. In theory, Republicans could have ripped this off. My colleague Sasha Issenberg has reported, all year, about the stat-geek techniques used by Democrats to tune up the standard tricks of get-out-the-vote campaigns and voter persuasion. Plenty of the RootsCampers I talked to had stories from losing campaigns, dating back to the Kerry 2004 debacle, when there was no real science about TV ads. The left had evolved faster than the right had evolved. Jeremy Bird, the national field director for OFA, told his Saturday audience of a plan that synched up perfectly with MoveOn and labor. As we got to the end, there were really only two things that mattered, said Bird. How many folks are registering to vote? Who are those people, and whos turning out for the early vote? All the other stuff is inputs. Those were the two things that told us: Are we changing the electorate, and are our voters turning out? The organizing was valued over the ads. Meanwhile, the Romney campaign and the Super PACs were blowing wads of cash on ads that washed right over people. In the OFA session, Bird called on former volunteersalternating the genders, boy-girl-boy-girlto get fresh anecdotes on what worked and what would no longer work. One Iowa organizer revealed that phone calls had become nearly useless for reaching college students. Bird asked the crowd, all 20-somethings and 30somethings, how many of them had landline phones. One woman raised her hand, in a crowd of a hundred people. The landline wasnt coming back, either, said OFAs Marlon Marshall, and that was going to be true in eight years, when we turn Texas blue. Bird pointed out that the contact rate on all phones had fallen from 23 percent in 2008 to 16 percent in 2012. He derided the idea of massive call centers in central locations. I had a flashback to all the time Id spent talking to Tea Party groups, proudly expanding their phone call outreach to voters. Standing near me, reflecting on even weightier problems, was Republican consultant Patrick Ruffini. He was one of the GOPs original digital gurus, building the 2004 Bush campaigns hub before going private. He spent the RootsCamp weekend flitting from panel to panel, finding out how his movement had lost so badly. The Legend of Ruffini spread on Twitter. Some panelists redacted their remarks when he was in the room, just as they blacked out key data when reporters were taking notes. He recorded the sessions with tweets, pointing out all the tricks that worked. The tone of these tweets alternated between the respectful and the envious. Universal takeaway: OFA state field staff are sharp. As the conference ended: Takeaway from #roots12: The socially awkward do it better. Later, he saw a report from Boston. Strategists for the Obama and Romney campaigns were there for a quadrennial, back-slapping debriefing with reporters. They ate chicken pot pie and mashed sweet potatoes and said things like we werent even running in the same race. Ruffini had to rub it in: They werent even at RootsCamp.

TechPresident: How Analytics Made Obama's Campaign Communications More Efficient http://techpresident.com/news/23214/how-analytics-made-obamas-campaign-communications-moreefficient By Sarah Lai Stirland December 3, 2012 Last Friday in Washington, D.C., both Evan Zasoski, Obama for America's deputy director for data production, and Michelangelo D'Agostino, the campaign's senior analyst for digital analytics, showed their progressive peers how analytics can make online communications far more efficient. Instead of blindly sending out mass e-mails to anyone who signed up, they worked to build models to analyze those subscribers and their behaviors in order to increase the impact of the digital teams' work. During a session last week, Zasoski and D'Agostino shared some of the kinds of tests that they did and models that they created -- although they cautioned that there was still a lot that they weren't free to disclose. Here are a few of their points: There are different kinds of tests you can conduct on your e-mail campaigns: There's one-off testing, like the one that they did in June that raised $2.6 million, as detailed by Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Or there are "best practices" tests, where "you're trying to isolate one very quantifiable notion of optimization before going forward," said Zasoski. For example, the Obama campaign did a lot of best practice testing on how much money it should ask donors for. It looked to its historical data on those donors, and their patterns of giving to deduce how to approach the donor. The campaign examined donors' highest previous donation amounts and then did tests asking them for various percentages of those highest previous donation amounts. They found that all versions of those requests did better than simply plucking a random number like $25 and asking donors for that set amount. The campaign found that people "who tend to give a lot of money" are also very likely to be comfortable being asked for a higher percentage of their previous donation. Watch out for "Frankenstein sends:" Beware of combining subject lines and content that performed well individually on their own, and then assuming that the combination when put together will generate a strong response. Models based on recipients' past responses to past e-mail campaigns can help organizers more efficiently target their specific communications. These models can be used to winnow out e-mails for people who are unlikely to respond to a specific kind of request (like volunteering,) and keep them on lists where they are likely to respond (maybe they just prefer to donate online,) D'Agostino said. The Obama campaign's digital analytics department used R, the open source statistical programming language, to build its models. Use automation to score your models as much as possible. Give the end-users, the people sending out the e-mails, and so forth, direct access to the output of your models through Web forms, so they don't have to ask you repeatedly for access to the lists of e-mails, and you're not e-mailing around evolving and confusing spreadsheets of e-mails. For example, they should be

able to use the forms to access the portion of the list that is most likely to go out and volunteer, and send messaging to that portion by pulling that list of people up through a Web form, D'Agostino said. The analytics department also used D3 for data visualization. The Atlantic: Data Vs Gurus: Democrats Say Metrics Are Eclipsing The Consultant Class http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/12/data-vs-gurus-democrats-say-metrics-are-eclipsingthe-consultant-class/265803/ By Nancy Scola December 3, 2012 With campaign post-mortems heavily focused on the data wizardry that delivered Democratic victories, progressive organizers -- including from the Obama campaign -- say that campaigns based on numbers, testing, and best practices may spell the demise of know-it-all political consultants. The argument: In the years since Howard Dean's quick rise and quicker fall, the left has embraced a model of campaign that's fueled by data, empowered supporters, and the sort of open-source information sharing that happened at the seventh annual RootsCamp conference in Washington, D.C., last week. And that, they say, is making Democrats felicitously less dependent than Republicans on political "gurus" in the Karl Rove mold, prized for generations on both sides of the aisle for the political wisdom kept locked away in their brains. Along with that comes a change in the economics of Democratic politics. "No person in D.C. gets a percentage from volunteer field," said Becky Bond, president of Credo SuperPAC, referring to the door knocking, phone banking, voter registration and other electioneering tasks delegated to unpaid campaign volunteers. "Volunteer field isn't going to buy the summer house." Bond spoke at a press briefing on the eve of RootsCamp featuring field organizers, data wranglers, and digital strategists from Obama for America, the AFL-CIO, Arizona's Adios Arpaio campaign, Marylanders for Marriage Equality, and other organizations, many of them trained over the years by RootsCamp host the New Organizing Institute. Bond and others described campaigns increasingly run by a generation of political professionals steeped in the practice of hands-on, metrics-focused, distributed campaigning. "Those are the campaigns that we believe in and we run, and you don't make a lot of money off those types of campaigns," Bond said. With campaigns functioning as the equivalents of businesses that shut down shortly after Election Day, win or lose, much of what's been learned on campaigns has traditionally been lost, said Daniel Mintz, campaign director at MoveOn.org. But the left has developed organizations -- the New Organizing Institute, MoveOn, and a newly, if arguably, functional Democratic National Committee -- that are acting as keepers of institutional knowledge between elections. One practical effect is that there is a corps of progressive staffers and volunteers "poised and ready to pounce" on the next campaign, said Betsy Hoover, director of digital organizing for the Obama campaign. Progressives at RootsCamp conceded that not every Democratic candidate or issue campaign on the left has gone all in on the tech-savvy model popularized by Obama. But they describe witnessing early signs of a cultural shift, in part driven the accountability baked into metrics. Democrats' focus on not only capturing online and offline data but testing it aggressively has, on occasion, begun to replace the general consultant's gut instinct on campaign decisions. There's an emerging data clique at events like RootsCamp that hangs out together and shares ideas, so that it's not unusual to overhear casual comments like, "The analytics people are getting together for happy hour at the pub up the street..."

Another sign: In the early days of the Obama 2012 campaign, senior staff tried to instill new technology hires with the sense that they shouldn't expect to feather their own nests while in Chicago. In June of last year, emails went out to Obama supporters that the campaign had identified as having tech or creative abilities. The notes raised the possibility of jobs on the reelection bid whether or not they had any political experience. "You're one of very few people receiving this email because, based on what you've told the Obama organization in the past," senior digital strategist Joe Rospars wrote in one such email, "we think you might know someone who should quit his or her job and come work on the Obama campaign's digital team for the next 18 months." But the pitch continued: "It won't pay very well. The hours are terrible .... Most people who come to work here will take a pay cut." A postscript even asked for money. "It should go without saying that your gift obviously won't help your or anyone else's application specifically, but if you care about getting campaign up and running you really should make a donation now," Rospars wrote. Carol Davidsen, a former Microsoft employee, got a similar email. She joined the campaign, in part to create The Optimizer, a project that blended voter demographic data and network ad rates to reveal which TV commercial spaces the Obama campaign should buy, a task traditionally left to ad consultants. "Targeting works," Davidsen told me recently. There was evident glee at RootsCamp over what's seen as Romney and Republican's poor performance when it comes to technology, data, and field operations. But there are also signs of considerable and growing restiveness over it on the professional right. In a blog post on RedState this week, conservative commentator and activist Erick Erickson condemned "the incestuous bleeding of the Republican Party," including the work of Zac Moffatt, Romney's digital director, whose digital-advertising company Targeted Victory benefitted from millions of dollars in consulting work for the Romney campaign. Moffatt, in a phone call a week and a half after Romney's defeat, defended his team's performance, saying that especially given the drain of the contested Republican primary their work met expectations. "I was proud 10 days ago, and I'm proud of it today," he said. Some conservatives say simmering unhappiness over Karl Rove's performance this election cycle, and in particular the many millions that his American Crossroads super PAC spent on TV ads in a raft of races that Republican candidates ended up losing, is serving to unify those who are unhappy with the state of GOP campaign practices -- and could soon bubble over from intramural grumbling into a more public rejection. Meanwhile, Patrick Ruffini, a well-known conservative digital strategist has been attending RootsCamp, including a detail-laden session on the Obama campaign's "outbound" team's best practice on sending and testing the emails that raised many millions of dollars for Obama's bid. Before the conference began, Ruffini tweeted, "In less than 12 hours, the #infiltration begins. #roots12." After his first day, Ruffini concluded this: "Dermocrats [sic] discuss things at conferences that Republicans discuss in conference rooms. Downside: Me leaking. Upside: More people." Some on the left profess that they're not so worried. Laura Olin was part of Obama's digital team and ran his Tumblr. She suggested that the campaign techniques being increasingly practiced and shared on the left aren't simply copy-and-pasteable on the right. "To the GOP strategists crashing a Dem digital conference today," she tweeted. "You realize our tactics might not work on people who deny evolution, right?" Commentary Magazine: The GOP's Broken Machine http://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-gops-broken-machine/ By Benjamin Domenech December 2012

It was just past dawn on Election Day, and already the whale was dead in the water. Project Orca, the not-sosecret high-tech weapon of Mitt Romneys 2012 campaign, was drowning in the deluge of thousands of attempted log-ins from volunteers across the country. The program was designed to be a 21st-century update to old-school poll watching, driven by more than 30,000 smartphone-equipped volunteers. The digital equivalent of scratching thousands of voters names off of a gigantic list, Orca was intended to give the Romney campaign staff up-to-the-minute insight into who had and hadnt made it to the polls, allowing them to target their robocalling more precisely and avoid pestering those who had already voted. Instead, Orca became one last failure from a campaign that never managed to get the little things right because it couldnt get the biggest thing right. Orca was a near-total operational failure. The program had been kept under wraps to its detriment, never fully stress-tested for the crunch of Election Day traffic. Volunteers who had tuned in to cheerleading conference calls with campaign staff never received their information packets on how to use it, and simple coding failures meant many people couldnt access the application at all. Calls to the relevant help lines went unanswered. And the checklist given to volunteers had somehow failed to remind them to bring the credentials they needed to monitor the polls legally, though it did tell them, twice, to bring a chair. For Republicans depressed by the election results, Orca was a symbol of their despondency at the Romney campaigns surprising failure to even come close to matching the get-out-the-vote efforts of the 2008 McCain campaign. Romney aides stepped up to defend the program, telling National Reviews Katrina Trinko that Orca has no relation to the outcome, adding, we achieved in a large part what we set out to do in the swing states in terms of our electorate. Given that fewer than half a million votes in four key swing states ended up being the difference between victory and defeat for Romney, this comment will provide little solace to disappointed Republicans. But in so far as it goes, it happens to be true. The Romney campaign raised Republican turnout in seven of their eight target battleground states, largely hitting the marks they thought they needed to win the 2012 election. Its assumptions simply turned out to be woefully inadequate, a failure of strategy and operation that left the campaign ill-equipped to battle President Barack Obamas tech-savvy get-out-the-vote machine. Campaign staff acknowledged that from the beginning they assumed they could not match Obamas well-built machine toe-to-toe, so they didnt try. In retrospect, Romney needed to match Obamas technology advantage in order to have a real chance at victory. But even if he had, it may not have been enough. From the start of the general-election season, Romneys national campaign manager, Matt Rhoades, repeated to his Boston staff a mantra inspired by the legendary order given at nearby Bunker Hill: Dont fire until you see the whites of their eyes. In the last month of the campaign, much of the staff thought theyd done just that. Were fing gonna win this thing, Romney pollster Neil Newhouse announced boldly in a staff meeting. His latest numbers, taken in the wake of Romneys strong debate performances, showed the ticket with a strong lead among independent voters. The campaigns internal polling assumed election turnout would favor the Democrats by only two or three percentage pointsand in such a scenario, the performance among independents had Romneys circle buzzing about victory. Actually, it was more of a murmur. Obamas Chicago team was housed in a gleaming spire, its offices packed with wall-to-wall whiteboards and its chief technology officer culled from the irony-clad hipster site Threadless. It was a place bursting with the youthful verve of a tech startup. Romneys Boston digs were more subdued, with little office conversation and an almost eerie quiet during the day. Romneys was also a house divided, in the literal sense: Staffers were in two buildings, the political and digital staff separated in a fashion that led to more than a little frustration for both sides during the course of the campaign. While digital efforts were the primary focus of the Obama campaign from the beginning, with data miners and tech gurus culled from Silicon Valley, they were a relatively late addition to the Romney effort. Its digital

operation was staffed after the rest of the campaign, with an operation that seemed remarkably inefficient for a campaign that was supposed to do things with the rigor of Romneys research-intensive firm, Bain Capital. There were plenty of people working on the digital side, but tasks were poorly assigned and hampered by restrictive approval processes. Romneys staff was politically diverse and more used to the world of business than politicssome had never worked on a political campaign before. Frustration set in, then boredom, then Facebook-browsing. The quiet was deafening. For digital staffers who recognized they were playing catch-up with the Obama machine that had never stopped building after 2008, the contrasts were infuriating. Where the Obama campaigns content and emails were tailored to the interests of individually targeted demographic communities based on topics of interest and other data-mined priorities, Romneys campaign didnt even make distinctions between whether someone had given $5 or $500, or whether the name came to the database through a petition about health care or energy policy. The campaign was also fiercely hierarchical, to the surprise of some longtime Romney staffers who found their ideas for innovation shunted aside by senior staff and consultants who were unapproachable and unresponsive. Ideas for how to defend the candidate more effectively, activate volunteers on key issues, or push back harder on false attacks were met with a repeated response: Dont get in trouble, dont rock the boat. In this, the campaign was fulfilling the risk-averse approach of Stuart Stevens, the man at the top of the campaign who built his career out of getting relatively bland politicians elected by keeping them on script and from making gaffes. Stevens is a strategist who wins by playing small ballshrinking information about policy to the bare minimum, sticking to inoffensive bullet points, and blanketing the airwaves with ads that blend together into one long reiteration of believing in America. After the debates, even the more skeptical campaign aides felt Stevenss strategy might work. Romney was hitting his stride at just the right time, they felt. The polls showed his likability gap with the president shrinking steadily. The images coming out of the campaigns closing weeks were simply beautifulRomney and vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan speaking to tens of thousands of supporters at Red Rocks in Colorado, in Loudoun County in Virginia, in West Chester in Ohio. The events were Norman Rockwell Americana for The North Face set, sweeping panoramas of patriotism and pridecontrasted with the relative diminution of President Obamas shrinking rallies, which had lower attendance and uglier backdrops. But the visual contrast hid the important difference of purpose. While Romney was packing out fields and stadiums in suburbia, the Obama campaign was holding early-voting rallies downtowncome to see the celebrities, then go around the corner to vote. _____________ Almost within minutes of Romneys concession, Orca came to symbolize a campaign that mismanaged the operational details. But that ignores the truly bothersome part: Even had Orca worked, it would have been a waste of time. The approach Orca was trying to improve upon has become an anachronism. Poll-watching is a tactic as old as Tammany Hall. It amounts to a group of volunteers sitting at a precinct crossing off names as they get ballots, a few more volunteers translating that data, and the rest working telephones to get missing voters to the polls. While such operations are still deployed by some consultants, more innovative consultants dislike the practice. They view it as a massive opportunity cost, with time on election day spent tracking votes your candidate already has instead of getting people to the polls. They consider it better to maximize the get-out-the-vote effort, deploying volunteers to walk door-to-door in key precincts rather than have them sitting at a poll location unable to increase vote totals.

Orca was designed to make robocalls work, reaching people who hadnt voted. But its not as if the Romney campaign lacked the resources to use actual humans to call as many people as possible on Election Day asking them to voteand if they already had, telling them to call their friends and get them to vote, too. Had the 30,000-plus Orca volunteers been deployed to target Republican districts door-to-door and by phone, its possible they couldve made a much more meaningful difference in battleground states. Instead of taking this approach, Romneys campaign wasted money and man-hours on a project that ended up giving it a half-days worth of incomplete data from their target counties. Adding insult to injury, much of the Orca data they pulled into their election-night headquarters in Bostonbefore the system crashed completelyindicated the wrong result, because the campaigns calculations about the necessary turnout targets were built into their analysis. According to one Romney aide, the assumption that it would be a narrow turnout advantage of a few percentage points doomed them from the start. A campaign that shot for just getting by was stunned by a Democratic turnout advantage that swept their data aside. _____________ In the end, Obamas team played small ball better. In an electoral race fought over slivers of the population in a handful of states with incredibly narrow ground, Obamas team drilled down with specific messages tailored to each of its target interest groups, each designed to caricature Romney as a wealthy out-of-touch technocrat who doesnt care about anyone who doesnt look like him. Beginning in the spring, every step was built around this destroy Romney narrative, with flash points on issues prioritized by their constituents. The White House declared war over contraception with the Catholic Church and trumpeted the life of a dependent avatar as a stand-in for single women. The administration went to battle over student loans to activate college kids and picked fights over immigration to make Republicans look anti-Hispanic. The campaign trumpeted the auto bailout to unions and defended Big Bird to appeal to suburban moms. And the technological network built around this narrative served as a defensive weapon, too. Even in the wake of the campaigns worst day, following the first debate, the Obama team was crafting issue-specific video clips and shareable content for their interest groups, counting on their vast network of digital supporters to minimize the damage. The Obama campaigns antagonism was specifically targeted, too, with brutal attacks on Romneys record at Bain Capital and his remarks on the 47 percent. While the negative attacks may have appeared to be an appeal to the liberal base, Ross Douthat of the New York Times pointed out that the real aim of these ads was to depress working-class whites, particularly in Ohio. If that was the intent, it worked: The drop in the white vote, particularly in economically downtrodden Southeast Ohio, exceeded Obamas margin of victory. On offense or defense, the overall narrative was simple: Mitt Romney didnt have your back, and Obama did. Thanks in part to the candidate and in part to the campaign, Romney never developed anything approaching this straightforward narrative. The pragmatism and competence that were Romneys best assets as a CEO seemed anachronistic in an era built on using key points of controversy to activate your base. Romneys mildmannered critique of Obamathat the president was a good man in over his headrequired voters to trust Romney to do better, if only by default. Again and again, Romney expressed his belief in Americabut he could never articulate why people should believe in him. The irony of the 2012 contest is that a candidate who ran primarily on competence stood atop a campaign that spent so much time unwittingly undercutting him on that point. This is not a problem unique to Romney, however. Since the legendary get-out-the-vote operation of the 2004 Bush campaign that increased his vote total 22 percent from 2000, Republicans have been focused on building massive databases of people. Orca was an approach consistent with this assumption. But that model is dated. The party needs to

become a party of technology and data mining, recognizing that precincts are now social, not just geographic. The Saturday before the first debate, Rhoades stood next to Romney and predicted that the next week was going to amount to an amazing turnaround in the race. The time had come for the whites of the enemies eyes. As a campaign mantra, it is an odd onean order delivered on defense, not offense, one that concedes the moment of attack to the opposition. But in retrospect, it is a fitting description for the Romney plan from the beginning: conceding the momentum, sticking to your enclosed position, and counting on making up the gap at the end with tricks like Orca. Campaign aides Ive talked to wonder if things would have gone differently if Romney himself had been on site at the Boston headquartersif he would have seen the flaws in the defensive strategy, the last-minute cramming before the test, the risk of being so risk-averse. But its likely he would have made the mistake of trusting in a campaign that wagered it all on beautiful ads and beautiful toys. Each day for the last three weeks of the election, one aide told me, Rhoades would repeat to his staff a phrase borrowed from David Mamets Glengarry Glen Ross, What do winners do? They close. And, the aide said, We didnt. Braceland: My Experience Leading the Obama Campaigns Tech Field Office http://cbracy.tumblr.com/post/36921516103/my-experience-leading-the-obama-campaigns-tech-field By Catherine Bracy November 30, 2012 In many ways the Obama campaigns Tech Field Office, which I launched and ran with Angus Durocher from February-October 2012, was not a leap of the imagination even if it was the first of its kind. Since 2007, one of the defining characteristics of the Obama organization was the extent to which it devolved authority down the chain empowering volunteers and field organizers to be the drivers of activity. Heavy dependence on and integration of network technology was also a major feature of the campaign, which makes sense when you realize that the structure of our grassroots organization (relatively flat, and decentralized) very closely matches the structure of the Internet itself. The logical extension of these two defining factors coming together was the establishment of a satellite office focused solely on recruiting technologists who wanted to volunteer their skills to help build the campaigns suite of tools. My understanding is that the genesis of the idea (which predates my arrival on the campaign) came when Michael Slaby (CIIO) and Harper Reed (CTO) traveled to the Bay Area just after the campaign launched to engage tech supporters and recruit engineers to move to Chicago. At some point it occurred: why not bring the campaign to them? We started talking about a San Francisco office even before I formally started on the campaign in June 2011, but other things in Chicago took precedence at that early stage. I spent the first eight months on the campaign doing product management at headquarters (not a role I was at all qualified for, given that I had very close to zero experience working on software development projects, talk about baptism by fire). Near the end of 2011 as the technology team, and the campaign as a whole, started moving from planning to execution a decision was made that we would go ahead and open the Obama Tech Field Office in San Francisco. I was to be the non-technical lead and Angus Durocher, a grizzled veteran of the San Francisco start-up scene (he was early at Blogger and served as the first web developer at YouTube) would lead on all the engineering and technical aspects. Angus was one of the very very few members of the Obama 2012 tech team that had any campaign experience. He grew up in New Hampshire working on campaigns and, in 2008, he took five

weeks off from working at YouTube to volunteer full time doing digital work in New Mexico for the Obama campaign. In many ways, opening and running this office was a fulfillment of a long-time wish of histo offer the opportunity for people with tech skills to contribute something theyre good at to an effort they believe in. He likes to tell a story about offering his services to the Kerry campaign in 2004 and being told to head to a phone bank instead. We secured office space (leasing desks at StackMobs offices in SOMA) and opened for business on February 15, 2012. We had a list of initial projects we needed to get built, but we needed some volunteers. My main responsibility those first few weeks was balancing volunteer recruitment with making sure the products were sufficiently well specked out to allow for volunteers (people who mostly had day jobs and would be doing their work remotely/on the weekends) to be productive. My biggest worry at the start was that we wouldnt be able to get enough people on board. That worry was quickly assuaged. We were pleasantly surprised at the level of interest. Even in famously libertarian Silicon Valley, we got hundreds of sign-ups and conducted scores of interviews with engineers and other tech professionals who were excited to help out. When we asked them why they were interested almost all of them gave some version of the same answer: Ive always wanted to help out but making phone calls and knocking doors wasnt my thing (not to mention I live in California where this thing is in the bag) and I saw an opportunity to lend my skills to re-elect a president I believe in. Only a handful of them had ever volunteered for a campaign before. We got to see, in person, what Nate Silver described in a recent post as the benefit Obama got from his support in Silicon Valley. Lets just say the GOP didnt have a tech field office in the neighborhood. We had some stressful weeks at the beginning, scared wed fail, scared this experiment would be a waste of campaign resources, unsure even what success would look like. But when we launched our first tool and pushed through the frustrating final tweaks to make things deployable I had a sense that we were doing something that would really have an impact. We certainly didnt do everything right and Im not even sure the office itself is something that other campaigns or organizations should try and replicate. For one thing wed added more lanes to the campaigns development highway without really expanding the capacity of the DevOps team in Chicago to deploy more tools (Im pretty sure they hated us by the end of it). And campaigns are, in Angus sage words, interrupt-driven organizations. The person thats in your face or the fire thats currently burning the brightest is the thing that gets the most attention. Since we were safely tucked away in San Francisco we didnt have the luxury (such as it was) of going over and tapping someone on the shoulder to make sure our particular issue got addressed. And then there was the frustrating amount of volunteer flakiness. Its something every campaign worker in the field has to deal with, but when your volunteer is doing something like writing code its a particular pain in the ass when you cant get a hold of them for days. By October, when we were done building tools for the national campaign and turned our attention to the battleground states, we had recruited well over 100 volunteers who built over a dozen tools (not all of which are public, but Ive linked to some examples below). We experienced the fifty-fifty rule of volunteer organizing: fifty percent of the volunteers we signed up actually did some work, and about fifty percent of them were solid, reliable contributors. Another dozen or so were absolute rock stars, a few of whom put their lives on hold for the last weeks of the campaign to travel to battleground states to support our data and digital teams. Kevin Gates, a former Google data whiz, went to Las Vegas to help the data director there. Johnvey Hwang, another start-up vet who built out later versions of Trip Planner essentially full time, went to Florida to build some reporting tools. Lior Abraham took all of his vacation days for the year from his job at Facebook to come to Chicago for five weeks to build voter protection apps. Matt Douglass, who built a really

cool donation app that we ran out of time to launch, ended up in one of our small business videos because of his involvement in the tech office. Angus led a very successful late-summer volunteer recruitment effort to send techies directly to states. The ask he sent out got thousands of responses which were matched up with states who needed on-the-ground tech help in the last weeks of the campaign. If I were smarter and more organized, Id follow up with all of them on their experience. I really think that modelof sending tech volunteers into the field to support data and analytics teams on the groundis a much more sustainable model of tech volunteer engagement for the long term and for smaller campaigns. When I was in Colorado for the last weeks of GOTV it was stark what a disconnect there seemed to be between the tech team and the people who were using the tools. Centralizing the software development in HQ in part to avoid creation of rogue tools in the states, which is completely understandable, might have killed an important ecosystem for bubbling up innovation. You certainly cant run a campaign where each state has their own show technologically, but theres got to be a way to distribute authority at least a little bit down the chain. Much was made about our pod structure: each region had desks they reported up to, which had all the main departments of the campaign representedDigital, Ops, Press, Field, Data, Analyticsbut no engineers. Why not add Tech to the pods and then have volunteer technologists on the ground working directly with that regional lead? Putting engineers directly in touch with staff in the states would have gone a long way towards bridging the divide between tech and field. Now that its over, my lasting impressions are all about how amazing our volunteers were. I mentioned a few earlier but Roger Hu, Marc Love, Brandon Liu, Eliza Wee, Carrie Crespo, Gunthar Hartwig, Pete Warden, Deron Aucoin, Shannon Chin, Patrick Cullen and a bunch of others Im forgetting were total champs. Im immensely proud that I got to be the one to pull them into the campaign, and I cant wait to see what they do now that theyve caught the political technology bug. Edit: Here are those tools I mentioned: Trip Planner Ecards MapMaker The Atlantic: The Social-Network Effect That is Helping Legalize Gay Marriage http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/my-best-friend-is-gay-where-social-networks-meetssame-sex-marriage/265793/ Nancy Scola November 30, 2012 It was no secret during past decades of ballot-box pummeling that social connections help determine where people stand on LGBT rights, say the organizers behind November 6's same-sex marriage wins in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington. They knew the public-opinion polls. Simply having a gay family member, friend, or colleague doubles the likelihood of support. "The meta narrative," says Michael Cole-Schwartz, director of media efforts for the Human Rights Campaign, "is that we win these fights because Americans know that LGBT people are their neighbors, their cousins, their aunts and uncles, the people they sit next to in church, and the people they shop with at the grocery store." More than that, experience told them that personal conversations on or around the significance of marriage were especially persuasive. And that stayed true when those talks happened between straight

people, like the conversations with his daughters Sasha and Malia that were said to change President Obama's thinking. But there was still a conundrum, and it had to do with amplification, explains Cole-Schwartz: "How do we get these conversations that happen naturally to happen more often?" It's a political challenge not limited to the question of LGBT issues. In their groundbreaking 2004 book Get Out the Vote!, Yale political scientists Alan S. Gerber and Donald P. Green wrote that "the more personal the interaction, the harder it is to reproduce on a large scale." At the time, though, Facebook had barely emerged from its Harvard dorm. Eight years later, Human Rights Campaign and local coalitions like Washington United for Marriage and Minnesotans United for All Families say they're beginning to figure out is how to tap the billions of social connections that have emerged there over the last four election cycles. HRC and its allies used a tool called Amicus, a product of the New York tech scene that puts your "social graph" -- a term popularized by Mark Zuckerberg to refer to the available digital knowledge on how all of us are related -- to work in raising political awareness, asking for votes, and raising money (the tool's name, of course, comes from the Latin for "friend"). Here's how it works. Pull up Call4Equality.HRC.org, that organization's version of Amicus, and then sign onto Facebook. First, you identify yourself in the voter file from public records. After that, up pops a listing of your Facebook friends, their identities fleshed out with the data Amicus has collected about them: When they were born. Where they were born. Where they live now. Where they went to high school. Where they went to college. On the nuts-and-bolts level, it's just data matching. But the social effect is powerful. The cause now knows not only a ton about a potential new supporter but also how they fit into a current supporter's own little piece of humanity's web. Then the organizers put that power to work. You are asked to reach out and contact those friends and friends-of-friends. The gold standard of outreach is to call them on the phone. (Suggested language: "You got married because you were in love and wanted to start a family? Me too.") But you can opt to email them instead. You can even send them an actual printed postcard, personalized with your photo from Facebook. That combination of public and semi-public data can be startling, but it works, says Seth Bannon, co-founder and CEO of Amicus. People are twice as likely to do something political if, through Amicus, they're asked by a friend to do it, he says. "You couldn't have done this five years ago," Bannon says. "Bits and pieces of it weren't possible even a few months ago." In large part, that's because Facebook has spent the last few years steadily opening its social graph to outside developers, and the voter data being matched with the graph comes from Catalist, the progressive information outfit that's only a few years old itself. Together the tool equipped marriage-vote organizers to operationalize their accumulated wisdom about human behavior in this election. One striking revelation from Facebook, say the LGBT-vote organizers, is that Americans are connected far and wide, even when they might not know that they are. Let's say you live in Florida or New Jersey and don't want to see Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, or Washington come down against same-sex marriage. You might have a college dormmate, cousin's best friend, or colleague from three jobs ago now living in Bangor or Glen Echo or Minneapolis or Richland. You might not remember that, but Facebook does. A pair of relevant statistics: The median "friend" count on Facebook is 190, while in "real life" Americans report having an average of two close friends. (There is, for the record, an opportunity to pull folks who aren't on Facebook into the mix using Amicus's find-a-friend feature.) That allows the HRC to target their million-and-a-half-

member supporter base to whatever political geography is relevant to the battle of the moment. "It gives us a universe of persuadable people for the cohort already on our side to reach out to" says Cole-Schwartz. Amicus debuted at Manhattan's New York Tech Meetup just last October, but its roots run deep. Bannon met co-founder Ben Lamothe in Harvard Square over chess tables year ago, when the former was studying philosophy and government Harvard and the latter theoretical mathematics at MIT. They picked up their third co-founder, Topper Bowers, a software developer who had been toiling at Snapfish, when they relocated to New York. In April, Bannon laid out his own story for me while sitting at General Assembly, the techcentric co-working space in the Flatiron District where Amicus is now based. He was born into politics, the ruddy 28-year-old Connecticut native said. He recalled being four years old, sitting on the shoulders of his socially aware and politically active mother during the contentious 1988 election between Republican Senator Lowell Weicker and upstart Democrat Joe Lieberman, telling to the challenger, "I hope you beat 'Eiker.'" Six years later, an explosion in their New Haven duplex on election night (of all nights) left Bannon's mother with lasting injuries that made engaging in politics difficult. "I realized that there were millions of people who couldn't do anything about it," Bannon says. "I dedicated myself to being their proxies." In the years since, Bannon has churned through campaigns, taking a leave of absence from Harvard in 2006 for Ned Lamont's bid to unseat Lieberman, and putting in time for Obama in 2008 and Alan Khazei's Senate campaign in 2009. Along the way, he says, "I was always frustrated with the tech." Bad systems meant wasting the efforts of volunteers, what he calls one of the more "beautiful" parts of the campaign life. He's set himself on building a solution. But Amicus is still in its early stages. On raw numbers, "it wasn't a barnstormer" at roll-out says James Servino, an online organizer with HRC. Amicus loses a lot of potential allies who come over the transom and don't engage right away, Bannon concedes, adding that increasing the platform's stickiness tops their to-do list. Organizers say that they would have liked to have seen more people pick up the phone. HRC puts the number of direct calls through Amicus at 7,000; the vote in Washington State was won by 228,000 votes. But organizers see in this early deployment signs of success. Funders, too, see a lot to like in Amicus. A week after the election, the company announced it had completed a round of funding worth $3.2 million. Amicus, says Bannon, is looking to increase its staff of seven, adding a data scientist as soon as possible. It would be ideal to have someone schooled in sociology, too, who might help them figure out not only who should be asked to engage in political action, but the best person in their social graph to prod them to make that leap. (Amicus is non-partisan and the platform generally open, "but if you're trying to take away rights," says Bannon, "we won't work with you.") The company is also considering taking more seriously something in which they've only been dabbling: anonymous modeling. "If you call a 32year-old woman at 3 p.m. on a Thursday and ask her for $30 and she says 'no,'" says Bannon, "we capture that." It's valuable data that gets poured into a growing cache that could someday allow them to know that a woman of that age and job status should be called after working hours and asked for 20 bucks instead. Also important: the psychology of volunteers themselves. The vision driving Amicus is one of creating a more robust version of the campaign experience -- more immediate, more knowing. But some things are lost in the digital conversion, like the the camaraderie that nudges volunteers towards picking up the phone at an inperson phone bank. To help solve that, volunteers who rack up participation points and thus moved up levels were rewarded with both virtual goods, like Facebook badges, and real goods, like stickers, T-shirts, and drawstring bags.

The gamification proved serious business. "People were willing to write an angry email when they didn't get their points," says Bannon, "which is a pretty good sign it works." They have been talking to Gerber, the political scientist, about adding in subtle encouragements like, perhaps, bumping an old buddy to the top of a volunteers call list after a few discouraging interactions with voters closer to the edges of their networks. And there are also more obvious affirmations on deck. As part of a planned redesign, says Bannon, "it's going to tell you when someone has just been hung up on five times in a row and needs a high five." (A virtual one, of course.) Amicus fits comfortably into a bigger, counterintuitive trend in digital politics. In a recent post-campaign debrief, Obama campaign manager Jim Messina argued that "what campaigns are evolving into, actually, in many ways is a return to the past." Much of the advanced tech the campaign deployed, said Messina, succeeded in making the experience of door-to-door campaigning less tedious and more efficient. The ambition of a surprising amount of political technologies is to move away from the cacophony of political TV ads and tweets and Facebook wall posts -- and back to actual conversations between actual humans. Amicus connects users via social media but discourages its use in practice; political tweets and posts, says Bannon, come across as too "spammy." Of course, this is a new kind of conversation where you have far more knowledge about your neighbor at your fingertips than you did before. Is that creepy? Is it too creepy? Logging onto Amicus and seeing even just your own name in the voter file can be unsettling. Public information is one thing, but this is public public, combined with all that social-media data that wasn't meant to mean anything. Bannon admits there is often a "whoa" moment. You pick up the phone, dial the number on the voter file, and say, "Hey, you went to college with my step-brother, and we hung out that one time at the Brickskeller your junior year. How do you feel about marriage equality?" In some ways, Amicus engineers around it, pretending to know less than it does by, for example, hiding street numbers. But organizers say they're riding a technological wave where people seem to get over their squeamishness if they judge that they're trading privacy for the chance to make a stronger social connection. Right now, Amicus is calibrated to make the most of even the squeamish. There are low-bar asks that still manage to be powerful. The first thing Amicus users are asked to do is act as a data refiner, matching their Facebook list to their friend's correct entry in the voter file. (People's names aren't unique, of course, and it's not always clear which address is a current one.) Bannon says that 21,000 matches were made through the HRC, and about as many in Minnesota. "If someone matches friends and leaves because they're shy, they're still creating a lot of value," says Bannon. "They're enabling another volunteer to make that friend-of-a-friend call." What's more, Minnesota volunteers were also asked to tag their friends as supporters or opponents of same-sex marriage. As for who owns the resulting data, the information on whose Facebook profile matches which entry in the voter file stays with Amicus. The cause -- say, Minnesota United -- gets to keep that insight on whether or not someone is a same-sex marriage supporter. It's a kind of in-kind contribution of your social graph, and a valuable one. "Once we let people know that it saves us time and money to let us know that your friends are voting 'no,' it's pretty convincing," says Nicholas Kor, who worked on Minnesota United's "Let Your Friends kNOw" program. In Minnesota, they assign numbers to it. A few clicks to let them know where a friend stands, the Minnesota coalition told volunteers, saved the marriage push half an hour's worth of work and about $30. Amicus is still a fledgling technology, but the ideas on peer-to-peer organizing it's tapping into run through the age of data-infused politics. In Facebook's own early days, users were given the choice of tagging themselves with a discrete number of political identifiers ranging from very liberal to very conservative, with

apathetic also included in the mix. The caused a stir when, in 2008, they switched instead to a scrolling mix of international political parties. Today, the "political affiliation" option is a jumble of adjectives and established organizations, as well as a text box for people to fill in however they wish. The acknowledgement: when you move beyond simply Republican and Democrat in America, things get messy. The Obama campaign realized that many of the voters they'd identified as possibly swinging their way watch Fox News, deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter said at a recent panel. On the same-sex-marriage question, state-level organizers say, you can study the data enough to know that Democrats tend to be more supportive of same-sex marriage than Republicans, women more than men, urban voters more than rural ones. But those models are rough and incomplete. "It's not a clean partisan break," says Zach Silk, the 30-something campaign manager for Washington's samesex-marriage campaign. The final vote breakdowns aren't in, and the state's voter records are non-partisan, but Silk explains, "we found that there were a pretty remarkable number of conservative voters that ended up supporting us." Social data, he says, helped narrow down a universe of some 3.6 million voters to figure out which of them were the few, important persuadable ones. It was a tactic borne of necessity. "We know that as much as 20 percent of Democrats weren't going to be with us," says Silk. "To get a winning majority, we needed to bring in as many libertarian-oriented Republicans as possible." It was a pattern repeated across the four battleground states. Ari Wallach, the strategist known as one of the minds behind such work as Samuel L. Jackson's pro-Obama "Wake the F___ Up" video, Sarah Silverman's profane voter ID ads, and 2008's The Great Schlep, helped launch Friendfactor, a celebrity-celebrated political effort to make the most of the social bonds between Americans of all sexual identities. One lesson he's picked up, Wallach says, is that "20- and 30-year-olds don't want to take political action on behalf of organizations anymore. Their brand allegiance has shifted from vertical, broadcast brands to hyperlocal" -- friends, co-workers, neighbors. Amicus makes peer-to-peer connections possible on that level, and not only is the tool not branded as Amicus when volunteers are using it, it's sometimes not even branded with the name of the organization that's providing supporters with an organizing channel. In Washington, Amicus and other tools were simply packaged as Marriage Hero. "I see in Amicus the future of political parties, more than I see the future of political parties at the DNC or the RNC," Wallach says. Maybe, maybe not, but it's not difficult to imagine that institutions now framed around partisan dichotomies might be reshaped with fuller knowledge of the likes, interests, and friendships of the American electorate. Our politics, as practiced by real-live humans, is rarely quite as clean as our partisanship suggests. Lowell Weicker ended up ending his career as an independent. For that matter, so did Joe Lieberman. People are complicated. Just ask their friends. Tech President: Obamas Targeted GOTV on Facebook Reached 5 Million Voters, Goff Says http://techpresident.com/news/23202/obamas-targeted-gotv-facebook-reached-5-million-voters-goffsays#.ULkX9aSzrN0.twitter Nick Judd November 30, 2012 The president's re-election campaign used targeted person-to-person contact on Facebook to reach five million voters, many of whom were the focus of an effort to reach 18-to-29-year-old voters who not be reached by phone, Obama for America Digital Director Teddy Goff said Friday.

Campaign officials have previously said that asking supporters to reach out to their friends had a high rate of success, but I hadn't heard a campaign staffer actually say how many people the campaign reached this way until today. Goff and OfA Deputy Campaign Director Stefanie Cutter discussed technology, communications and the 2012 campaign during a taping for SiriusXM Left held at Rootscamp and set to air later on Friday. His remarks do more to validate the hype around directed, person-to-person Facebook contact, which may emerge as a new core technology in much the same way campaigns embraced online advertising and SMS messaging after watching those tools work in 2008. The problem with GOTV targets in that age group is that half of them can't be reached by phone, Goff said. But 85 percent(!) of them were a friend of a friend of Barack Obama on Facebook, he said. "Facebook became the only place where we could reach them," Goff said. "So we had about seven million instances of people contacting about five million people, all of their friends who they knew ... these were people we had to reach, and couldn't reach otherwise," Goff added later on. Obama campaign officials have already said that 20 percent of people asked by their friends to register, vote or take another activity did as they were asked to do. Consultants I spoke with said that was all well and good, but the fact that the campaign was talking about rates rather than hard numbers suggested the number of people who were actually contacted was low. Just shy of 1 million people had signed up for the Obama for America Facebook app as of election day. Goff said supporters reached about five million people through Facebook with seven million pieces of content. And it's already been well established that fewer young voters have landline phones while more people generally are communicating over the Internet, especially over mobile phones and on social networks. So there you go. ProPublica: Everything We Know (So Far) About Obama's Big Data Tactics http://www.propublica.org/article/everything-we-know-so-far-about-obamas-big-data-operation By Lois Beckett November 29, 2012 For the past nine months, weve been following how political campaigns use data about voters to target them in different ways. During the election, the Obama campaign, which had assembled a cutting-edge team of data scientists, developers, and digital advertising experts, refused to say anything about how it was targeting voters. Now, members of the campaign are starting to open up about what their team actually did with all that data. Based on our own interviews with campaign officials, as well as reporting elsewhere, heres an overview of some of the campaigns key strategies, from connecting Facebook data to the national list of registered voters, to measuring how persuadable individual swing state voters might be. Heres what the nerds did. What data did they useand were they tracking you across the web?

Its still not clear. Chief Innovation and Integration Officer Michael Slaby and other campaign officials said again that they relied less on consumer data, and more on public voting records and the responses that voters provided directly to campaign canvassers. They would not comment on exactly what data the campaign collected about individual people. Officials within the campaign said media reports had overemphasized the importance of online web cookie data to track voters across the web. Slaby said the campaign primarily used web cookies to serve ads to people who had visited the campaign site a tactic called retargeting, which Mitt Romneys campaign also used. The campaign also told us web cookies were useful for helping them analyze whether volunteers were actually reading the online training materials the campaign had prepared for them. (They didnt track this on a volunteer-by-volunteer basis.) The backbone of the campaigns effort was a database on registered voters compiled by the Democratic National Committee. It was updated weekly with new public records from state level election officials, one official said. The campaign then added its own voter data to the mix. Officials wouldnt say exactly what information they added. What will happen to the data about millions of voters collected during the campaign? It's still not clear. As the Washington Post reported earlier this month, other Democratic candidates are eager to use Obama's voter data for their own campaigns. Some of the president's data will certainly go to the Democratic National Committee, where it can be used to help other Democrats. But both the Post and the Wall Street Journal reported that it's unclear if the DNC has the resources technological and financial to manage all of the voter data and analysis the campaign produced. The Wall Street Journal cited an anonymous Democratic Party official, who said that a new organization might be created to manage and update Obama's campaign data. This kind of organization "would have the potential to give the president leverage in the selection of the next Democratic presidential nominee," the Journal reported. After his 2008 win, Obama created "Organizing for America," a group that worked within the DNC to advance the president's agenda. How did the Obama campaign know which TV shows voters were watching? Did the Obama campaign really "get a big list of the names of people who watched certain things on TV," as Gawker asked earlier this month?

No. But they were able to get very detailed information about the television habits of certain groups of voters. In order to decide where to buy their TV ads, the Obama campaign matched lists of voters to the names and addresses of cable subscribers, as the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and others have reported. This allowed them to analyze which channels the voters they wanted to reach were watching. The campaign focused on swing state voters the campaign had scored as "persuadable," and voters who were supporters but needed to be encouraged to turn out at the polls, Carol Davidsen, who ran the campaign's television ad "Optimizer" project, told ProPublica. They also looked at voters who are Latino and African-American. Working with Rentrak, a data company, the campaign tracked the television viewership of these groups across 60 channels, looking at how viewership changed for every quarter hour of the day, Davidsen said. The campaign was able to identify the audience size of each group for a particular channel at a particular time and then analyze where and when the campaign could advertise to key voters at the lowest cost. For instance, the campaign was able to identify a subset of persuadable voters who lived in households that watched less than two hours of television a day. This allowed the campaign to schedule ads during the times these voters would actually be watching TV. "Even if it's more expensive, it's worth it, because we can't catch them later," Davidsen told ProPublica. So, how was the campaign able to get all this viewership data? In Ohio, the campaign worked with FourthWall Media, a data and targeting company, to get television viewership data for individual homes, which had "anonymous but consistent" household ID numbers, Davidsen said. This allowed the campaign to track household viewing behavior over time, without knowing which exact voters they were analyzing. (FourthWall Media has yet to respond to a request for comment on how their process works.) Working with Rentrak, the campaign could follow the viewing habits of larger groups of voters in different TV markets across the country. Rentrak used a third-party data company to match lists of voters to TV operator data about subscribers and then match that information to the anonymous ID numbers that Rentrak uses to track the usage patterns of television set-top boxes. To protect users' privacy, none of the companies involved have all the information they would need to know what shows a specific voter watched on TV, Rentrak's Chris Wilson told ProPublica. For instance, Rentrak knows viewers' ID numbers and viewing habits, but doesn't know which ID numbers correspond with which name or address. In fact, Rentrak never knows the name or address of the household, Wilson said. While commercial advertisers are beginning to do this kind of data matching and analysis, "What [the Obama campaign] did was probably on the more sophisticated side compared to a lot of folks," Wilson told ProPublica. He said the campaign had done "pioneering work" in television targeting.

Rentrak also works with large consumer data companies, including Experian and Epsilon, to match television viewer data with consumer data. According to the Federal Communications Commission privacy rules, cable operators are not allowed to disclose subscribers' "personally identifiable information" without their consent, but they can collect and share "aggregate" data. How important was the data the campaign could access through its Facebook app about volunteers and their friends? Observers noted that in the last days of the campaign, Obama supporters who used the campaigns Facebook app received emails with the names and profile photos of friends in swing states. The e-mails urged supporters to contact their friends and encourage them to vote. It wasnt clear how well the effort went or what the response was. Some people had been encouraged to ask their Republican friends to vote. A Romney official who had signed up for the campaigns e-mail list was told to contact his Facebook friend Eric Cantor, the Republican House Majority Leader. What we now know is that the campaign did in fact try to match Facebook profile to peoples voting records. So if you got a message encouraging you to contact a friend in Ohio, the campaign may have targeted that friend based on their public voting record and other information the campaign had. But the matching process was far from perfect, in part because the information the campaign could access about volunteers friends was limited. Were privacy concerns about the campaigns data collection justified? Weve reported on some of the concerns about the amount of data the campaign has amassed on individual voters. Were those concerns at all justified? Its hard to say right now, since we still dont know where the campaign drew the line about what data they would and would not use. Obama officials did dismiss the idea that the campaign cared about voters porn habits. The analytics team estimated how persuadable voters are. What does that mean? It all came down to four numbers. The Obama campaign had a list of every registered voter in the battleground states. The job of the campaigns much-heralded data scientists was to use the information they had amassed to determine which voters the campaign should target and what each voter needed to hear. They needed to go a little deeper than targeting waitress moms. White suburban women? Theyre not all the same. The Latino community is very diverse with very different interests, Dan Wagner, the campaigns chief analytics officer, told The Los Angeles Times. What the data permits you to do is figure out that diversity.

What Obamas data scientists produced was a set of four individual estimates for each swing state voters behavior. These four numbers were included in the campaigns voter database, and each score, typically on a scale of 1 to 100, predicted a different element of how that voter was likely to behave. Two of the numbers calculated voters likelihood of supporting Obama, and of actually showing up to the polls. These estimates had been used in 2008. But the analysts also used data about individual voters to make new, more complicated predictions. If a voter supported Obama, but didnt vote regularly, how likely was he or she to respond to the campaigns reminders to get to the polls? The final estimate was the one that had proved most elusive to earlier campaignsand that may be most influential in the future. If voters were not strong Obama supporters, how likely was it that a conversation about a particular issue like Obamacare or the Buffett rulecould persuade them to change their minds? Slaby said that there was early evidence that the campaigns estimate of how persuadable voters would be on certain issues had actually worked. This is very much a competitive advantage for us, he said. Wagner began working on persuasion targeting during the 2010 campaign, Slaby said giving the campaign a long time to perfect their estimates. Did everyone on the campaign have access to these scores? No. Campaign volunteers were not given access to these individual scores, one official said. Oh, my neighbor Lucy is a 67 and her husband is a 72we would probably consider that a distraction. Do other political campaigns also assign me a set of numerical scores? Yes. The use of microtargeting scores a tactic from the commercial world is a standard part of campaign data efforts, and one that has been well documented before. In his book exploring the rise of experimentally focused campaigns, Sasha Issenberg compares microtargeting scores to credit scores for the political world. In 2008, the Obama campaign ranked voters likely support of the senator from Illinois using a 1 to 100 scale. This year, The Guardian reported, Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group backed by the Koch brothers, ranked some swing state voters on a scale from 0 to 1, with 0 being so leftwing and progovernment that they are not worth bothering with, and 1 being already so in favour of tax and spending cuts that to talk to them would be preaching to the converted. Whats different about what Obamas data scientists did?

Obama campaigns persuadability score tried to capture not just a voters current opinion, but how that individual opinion was likely to change after interactions with the campaign. Most importantly, Obamas analysts did not assume that voters who said they were undecided were necessarily persuadablea mistake campaigns have made in the past, according to targeting experts. Undecided is just a big lump, said Daniel Kreiss, who wrote a book on the evolution of Democratic networked politics from Howard Dean through the 2008 Obama campaign. Voters who call themselves undecided might actually be strong partisans who are unwilling to share their viewsor simply people who are disengaged. Someone who is undecided and potentially not very persuadable, you might spend all the time in the world talking to that person, and their mind doesnt change. They stay undecided, Slaby said. To pinpoint voters who might actually change their minds, the Obama campaign conducted randomized experiments, Slaby said. Voters received phone calls in which they were asked to rate their support for the president, and then engaged in a conversation about different policy issues. At the end of the conversation, they were asked to rate their support for the president again. Using the results of these experiments, combined with detailed demographic information about individual voters, the campaign was able to pinpoint both what kinds of voters had been persuaded to support the president, and which issues had persuaded them. Avi Feller, a graduate student in statistics at Harvard who has worked on this kind of modeling, compared it to medical research. The statistics of drug trials are very similar to the statistics of experiments in campaigns, he said. I have some cancer drug, and I know it works well on some peoplefor whom is the cancer drug more or less effective? Campaigns have always been about trying to persuade people. Whats new here is weve spent the time and energy to go through this randomization process, Slaby said. Issenberg reported that Democratic strategists have been experimenting with persuasion targeting since 2010, and that the Analyst Institute, an organization devoted to improving Democratic campaign tactics through experimentation, had played a key role in its development. Slaby said the Obama campaigns persuasion strategy built on these efforts, but at greater scale. Aaron Strauss, the targeting director at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in a statement that the DCCC was also running a persuasion targeting program this year using randomized experiments as part of its work on congressional races. What were the persuasion scores good forand how well did they work? The persuasion scores allowed the campaign to focus its outreach effortsand their volunteer phone calls on voters who might actually change their minds as the result. It also guided them in what policy messages individual voters should hear.

Slaby said the campaign had some initial data suggesting that the persuasion score had been effectivebut that the campaign was still working on an in-depth analysis of which of its individual tactics actually worked. But a successful persuasion phone call may not change a voters mind foreverjust like a single drug dose will not be effective forever. One official with knowledge of the campaigns data operation said that the campaigns experiments also tested how long the persuasion effect lasted after the initial phone conversationand found that it was only about three weeks. There is no generic conclusion to draw from this experimentation that persuasion via phone only lasts a certain amount of time, Slaby said. Any durability effects we saw were specific to this electorate and this race. Bloomberg Businessweek: The Science Behind Those Obama Campaign E-Mails http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-29/the-science-behind-those-obama-campaign-e-mails By Joshua Green November 29, 2012 One fascination in a presidential race mostly bereft of intrigue was the strange, incessant, and weirdly overfamiliar e-mails that emanated from the Obama campaign. Anyone who shared an address with the campaign soon started receiving messages from Barack Obama with subject lines such as Join me for dinner? Its officially over, It doesnt have to be this way, or just Wow. Jon Stewart mocked them on the Daily Show. The womens website the Hairpin likened them to notes from a stalker. But they worked. Most of the $690 million Obama raised online came from fundraising e-mails. During the campaign, Obamas staff wouldnt answer questions about them or the alchemy that made them so successful. Now, with the election over, theyre opening the black box. The appeals were the product of rigorous experimentation by a large team of analysts. We did extensive AB testing not just on the subject lines and the amount of money we would ask people for, says Amelia Showalter, director of digital analytics, but on the messages themselves and even the formatting. The campaign would test multiple drafts and subject linesoften as many as 18 variationsbefore picking a winner to blast out to tens of millions of subscribers. When we saw something that really moved the dial, we would adopt it, says Toby Fallsgraff, the campaigns e-mail director, who oversaw a staff of 20 writers. It quickly became clear that a casual tone was usually most effective. The subject lines that worked best were things you might see in your in-box from other people, Fallsgraff says. Hey was probably the best one we had over the duration. Another blockbuster in June simply read, I will be outspent. According to testing data shared with Bloomberg Businessweek, that outperformed 17 other variants and raised more than $2.6 million. Writers, analysts, and managers routinely bet on which lines would perform best and worst. We were so bad at predicting what would win that it only reinforced the need to constantly keep testing, says Showalter. Every time something really ugly won, it would shock me: giant-size fonts for links, plain-text links vs. pretty Donate buttons. Eventually we got to thinking, How could we make things even less attractive? Thats how we arrived at the ugly yellow highlighting on the sections we wanted to draw peoples eye to.

Another unexpected hit: profanity. Dropping in mild curse words such as Hell yeah, I like Obamacare got big clicks. But these triumphs were fleeting. There was no such thing as the perfect e-mail; every breakthrough had a shelf life. Eventually the novelty wore off, and we had to go back and retest, says Showalter. Fortunately for Obama and all political campaigns that will follow, the tests did yield one major counterintuitive insight: Most people have a nearly limitless capacity for e-mail and wont unsubscribe no matter how many theyre sent. At the end, we had 18 or 20 writers going at this stuff for as many hours a day as they could stay awake, says Fallsgraff. The data didnt show any negative consequences to sending more. After a pause, he offered a qualification: We do know that getting all those e-mails in your in-box is at least mildly irritating to some people. Even my father would point that out to me. The bottom line: Obamas e-mail fundraising team tested hundreds of grabby subject lines. The most successfulHey brought in millions of dollars. Tech President: Hes Back! Alan Grayson Shares His Thanksgiving Wal-Mart Escapade on Facebook and YouTube http://techpresident.com/news/23183/hes-back-alan-grayson-shares-his-thanksgiving-wal-mart-escapadefacebook-and-youtube Sarah Lai Stirland November 27, 2012 Congressman-elect Alan Grayson hasn't even been sworn in yet, but he's already engaging the public and putting issues on the radar with his signature use of social media. The "blogosphere's man in Congress" was one of two documented members of the House to publicly associate themselves with the Labor-backed Wal-Mart protests this Thanksgiving. (The other was California Representative George Miller, the top Democrat on the House Education and Labor Committee, reports The Nation.) Grayson attended a protest at one of the stores in Orlando, posed for a photo with an associate, and in a Saturday Facebook posting lambasted Wal-Mart for its low wages and for mooching off the taxpayer by forcing employees onto public assistance. He also recounted his experience, and explained that he was marched off Wal-Mart's premises by its security guards. That drew attention. On Tuesday, he appeared on CNN's Newsroom with Carol Costello, where he reiterated most of the points made in his Facebook post, which were essentially many of protest organizer OUR Walmart's points -- that Wal-Mart is a profitable corporation, and that they can afford to pay their associates more, and treat them with more respect. Congressman-elect Alan Grayson hasn't even been sworn in yet, but he's already engaging the public and putting issues on the radar with his signature use of social media. The "blogosphere's man in Congress" was one of two documented members of the House to publicly associate themselves with the Labor-backed Wal-Mart protests this Thanksgiving. (The other was California Representative George Miller, the top Democrat on the House Education and Labor Committee, reports The Nation.) Grayson attended a protest at one of the stores in Orlando, posed for a photo with an associate, and in a Saturday Facebook posting lambasted Wal-Mart for its low wages and for mooching off the taxpayer by

forcing employees onto public assistance. He also recounted his experience, and explained that he was marched off Wal-Mart's premises by its security guards. That drew attention. On Tuesday, he appeared on CNN's Newsroom with Carol Costello, where he reiterated most of the points made in his Facebook post, which were essentially many of protest organizer OUR Walmart's points -- that Wal-Mart is a profitable corporation, and that they can afford to pay their associates more, and treat them with more respect. He also threw in some startling statistics: "In state after state," he wrote, "The largest group of Medicaid recipients is WalMart employees. Im sure that the same thing is true of food stamp recipients. Each WalMart associate costs the taxpayers an average of more than $1,000 in public assistance." Grayson didn't cite the source for his statistics, nor the time frame for this alleged $1,000 in public assistance. Wal-Mart didn't respond to a request for comment at the time of this post. When Costello noted what many other people have noted over the past few days -- namely that there appeared to be very few actual Wal-Mart employees amongst the ranks of the protestors, Grayson responded: "The protests aren't meant to stop people from shopping. The protests are meant to inform workers of their rights to organize under the law, and under the constitution, and to make sure that they understand that they are not alone, and they will be protected if they exercise their rights. It's not meant to raise prices, or to interfere with shopping, it's meant to organize people who desperately need to be organized to make a better life for themselves." He also told Costello that the federal minimum wage needs to be higher. Then he promptly uploaded the clip to YouTube, where he has almost 8,000 subscribers. Grayson has previously shared his thoughts about how he deliberately uses YouTube to communicate directly with the public on issues that he cares about. In 2010, he told Mother Jones that he routinely delivered short, YouTube-friendly (in Nick Baumann's words) speeches. Grayson also used Facebook during his campaign to communicate with the public. The Walmart posting, along with others, such as November 4's "Idiot Wind: 'A Socialist Nightmare Hellscape,'" ridiculing his Republican opponent's hyperbole, illustrate that the congressman-elect fully intends to use these channels to bring attention in his own unique way to both mainstream issues as well as others that might not be on the political radar or on the Congressional to-do list. NJ.com: How I won an election by only using Facebook http://www.nj.com/south/index.ssf/2012/11/how_i_won_an_election_by_only.html#incart_river Jim Cook November 22, 2012 My campaign lasted less than 24 hours. It didnt cost me a cent. All I used was a few Facebook status updates saying Write me in for Woodstown-Pilesgrove School Board candidate.

Sure enough, there is power in social media. After nearly three weeks of counting over 500 write-in ballots, a quick call to the Salem County Clerks office confirmed I won. Lets take a walk back and see how this transpired. Monday, Nov. 5 was my brother Joeys birthday. My parents and I sat around our kitchen table late at night finishing up our cake and tossing away the wrapping paper when we came across our sample ballots. The next day, we all would vote. Since this was my brothers first presidential election in which he would vote, we all had a good discussion about the various public questions, defining the likes of words such as bond referendum, and how taxpayers would be affected by the yes or no votes. Anyway, we noticed that there were two openings on the Woodstown-Pilesgrove Board of Education. Thats when the fun started. I pulled out my iPhone half-jokingly and typed in: Hey everyone! I noticed you need to vote for 2 for W-P school board. But theres only one candidate. Write-in Jim Cook Jr. !!! It was a presidential election, so I expected my post to be lost in the flurry of Obama/Romney posts. It wasnt. Twenty of my friends commented that they would vote for me. I posted again, urging friends to write me in. More comments and confirmations of votes. The more support I received, the more of a wake-up call it was to take this more seriously so I did. My first post went up around 10:30 p.m. Monday night, and my last went up less than 24 hours later. Eight posts total, asking for votes. When the count came in that night to our editorial desk, 261 write-in votes were reported in Pilesgrove Township for the vacant seat. Nearly every day for 15 days, I called the Salem County clerks office to find out if I had won. Over 200 other votes were cast in Woodstown, as well, with nearly 600 total write-ins cast for the vacant seat. The delay in finalizing the votes was due to superstorm Sandy, according to the clerk's office. Wednesday, Nov. 21, came along and I called Salem County Clerk Gilda Gill and she asked me my full name and my address. It was a match. I won a three-year term to Woodstown-Pilesgrove Regional School Board. Next, I hopped up and down and had a mild chain of outbursts in our office, proclaiming I had won. It was an exciting moment. I called my parents. I texted some friends. Then I posted on Facebook the news of winning and almost instantly got flooded with congratulatory messages many of them saying I would bring a fresh perspective. That meant the most to me, hearing that. It was even better than winning hearing from friends I hadnt heard from in years. Im sad to say, however, I cannot accept the position on Woodstown-Pilesgrove Board of Education. I wish I could, but I have to take the ethical route here and make the best decision for my career and the South Jersey Times a job and company too close to my heart to put in jeopardy. In my field of work, it is of the utmost importance that a reporter or editor does not serve on any elected position in politics. Objectivity is the basis of our dedication to local journalism in South Jersey. That cant be

hindered. If I accepted the position, I would have to resign from a job that I worked too hard to get and feel too passionate about to give up. With that said, all I have left to say is thank you. Thank you for writing in my name, even if I was somewhat unorthodox in my campaign method of only using Facebook. Thank you for trusting me a proud 2006 graduate of Woodstown High School leading in one of the most difficult local elected positions that exist. I feel the Woodstown-Pilesgrove love. Theres nothing like it. What can we say we learned from this? Its a reminder that if we stick together, 'we the people' still have a voice that strongly impacts our community. I've learned and hope my friends have learned that as young people, we play a vital role in that voice. I hope I haven't let you down, and I'm sorry I cannot accept this position. I can, however, throw a victory party. And youre all invited. POLITICO: Jim Messina at the Politico Playbook Breakfast http://www.politico.com/multimedia/video/2012/11/jim-messina-at-politicos-playbook-breakfastevent.html 11/21/12 JIM MESSINA, Obama for America campaign manager, gave his first on-camera interview before a standingroom-only crowd at Playbook Breakfast: What Targeted Sharing was -- and I think it's one of the most important things we did -- was a Facebook app that allowed you to go and match your Facebook world with our lists, and we say to you, Mike, here are five friends of yours that we think are undecided in this race. Click here to send them a piece of viral content. Click here to send them a factsheet. Click here to ask them to support the President. *I+t took us a year of some amazing work of our talented technology team to figure out how to do it. But we were able to contact over 5 million people directly through their Facebook worlds, and people that they knew. So, they're going to look if their friend sends them something. They're going to look at it because they know that person. POLITICO: Jim Messina: What I learned in the election http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/84103.html#ixzz2DLt1pdEA Ginger Gibson November 21, 2012 Jim Messina, fresh off running the victorious Obama reelection campaign, oversaw the most technologyheavy campaign in history. But he insists it wasnt just number-crunching that led to victory. It was the convergence of 21st-century data and old-fashioned on-the-ground door-knocking that left Messina confident before Election Day that Barack Obama would be victorious over Mitt Romney. Its about the candidate. Its about the message. Its about where theyre going to lead this country with a vision, Messina said at POLITICOs Playbook Breakfast on Tuesday in his first on-camera interview since the election. Because thats why millions of Americans went online and signed up for Obama for America. It wasnt because they got a sexy T-shirtIt wasnt because of the great bumper sticker. It was because they deeply believed in Barack Obama. Here are 10 things about campaigning Messina learned along the way: 1. Public polls missed the mark

Public polls took a beating from Republicans this year, most of whom insisted they were inflating Obamas numbers to discourage GOP voters. (VIDEO: Messina: Cell phones fouled polling) But in the end, many of the public polls showed a very tight race nationally, although some of public surveys did show Romney leading in the final weeks of the campaign. And Messina isnt letting the pollsters off easy. Most of the public polls you were seeing were completely ridiculous, Messina said. A bunch of polling is broken in the country. With the data-heavy operation, Messina said the campaign could consistently see where the public polls were going wrong. The campaign calculated the early vote split within 1 percentage point and the Florida results with .2 percentage points, Messina said. He pointed most squarely to the lack of cellphone users included in most public polls. Federal regulations prohibited using an automated dialer to contact cellphone users for polling. Instead, a live person must dial and talk to the potential voter being polled and that makes conducting polls with cellphone users more expensive. As a result, many public polls leave cellphone users out of their samples. Messina said the growing popularity of cellphones as the only point of contact for young voters and minorities left key constituencies for Obama out of the polls and skewed the numbers for Romney in some samples. Cellphone usage has changed the industry, Messina said. Messina suggested that pollsters should look to actual state-generated voter registration rolls to identify voters and contact them instead of using their own samples. Thats why some polls looked so difficult for the president, because they were under-polling the electorate for the president, Messina said. 2. Hire smart people Messina got a piece of advice from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt: Hire smart people. And not necessarily political types. You want smart people, who you are going to draw what you want and theyre going to build it. Messina said Schmidt, who served as a campaign adviser, told him. So Messina set out to lure data-savvy campaign workers like chief technology officer Harper Reed, who had never worked on a campaign before. As a result, the 60-member tech team was able to build new tools such as Narwhal, which let it unify all kinds of information about voters and volunteers. It would start with hiring really smart people regardless of their age, [giving] them a budget and support and hold them accountable to deadline and they will build you some really great things, Messina said of the book he would write about running a technology-driven campaign.

The data crew crunched numbers, including running thousands of statistical models to track polling information, door-knocking, spending and advertising. Analytics was a department in the campaign that used data across the campaign to make everyones job easier, Messina said. The technology team was able to build Dashboard, a program that allowed the campaign to track a number of metrics. And it put all of the data at Messinas fingertips. The tech folks also used data points to model the most effective fundraising appeals. To convert those into cash, two fundraising appeals were sent: one using traditional direct mail requests and another with a tailored data request. The data-driven fundraising appeal outperformed the other by 14 percent, a remarkable difference when every dollar in the campaign matters. The biggest undertaking was a system that would allow people to identify their Facebook friends who were potential swing voters and personally encourage them to go to the polls or volunteer. The first response was that such an undertaking would be expensive, Messina said. I complained about how expensive it was and then we went and built it, he said. 3. Mass marketing is over The Obama campaign reduced some of the mass marketing of candidates that was a hallmark of previous campaigns, Messina said. A decade ago, the average voter got most of their information from the evening news, Messina said. Now, the average voter gets their news from 15 different sources, he said. Like the individually targeted fundraising appeals, the Dashboard system also allowed them to generate tailored voter appeals. The campaign shifted some of its resources to online advertising, an arena that provided more targets and a wealth of specific users. Television is still the dominant media, but I think online will catch up very quickly, Messina said. I think it already is for young voters out there. The next presidential, whoever has my job the next time, is going to have to decide what percentage you spend online. The shift to online was even more dramatic between 2008 and 2012, Messina said. On Election Day in 2008, the Obama campaign sent out one tweet on the social networking site Twitter. In 2012, the campaign not only had a Twitter team but also had a Facebook and Tumblr, as well as additional online social media presence. And the online engagement paid off: The campaign raised $700 million online this year, $200 million more than the previous election. 4. Spend early before the flood takes over One of the biggest missteps Republicans have pointed to in Romneys campaign was the flood of attack ads during the summer months that eviscerated the GOP nominees business record and went unanswered.

Messina said the Obama campaign made the calculated decision to spend early, even if that meant being outspent at the end of the campaign. Meanwhile, Romneys campaign frequently insisted that voters werent paying attention and that they would spend where it counted that is, more heavily at the end. But Messina points out the flood of advertisements, fueled by heavy spending from Democratic-aligned super PACs, allowed Democrats to define Romney before he could define himself. The negative images stuck. We believed that late TV didnt matter as much as early TV and it turns out we were right, Messina said. Messina gave credit to Romneys campaign for a fundraising operation that raised more big-dollar checks, but cautioned that also meant most of the Republicans money was tied up with the national party. And Romney relied more on his the super PACs than Obama did, Messina said. It was a crutch for them, Messina said. 5. Door knocking is the voter contact of the future Despite all the gee-whiz gadgets drawing media buzz, Messina insisted that the most important element of any campaign is old-fashioned door-knocking. There is a magical place that you can reach every voter: the door, Messina said. The campaign found that it was important to engage supporters, even those who werent likely to support Romney, to keep the base involved in the conversation. It launched a barbershop and beauty shop engagement effort in important places like Ohio, where African-American turnout was up 4 points from 2008 and held the key to victory. Too many Democrats just put Barack Obamas picture on a piece of paper, Messina said. You must have an ongoing conversation about why they should support the president, why they should get out and vote. The campaign found that the best way to contact voters wasnt through out-of-state workers but via local residents who know their neighbors, individual issues and how they historically vote. Messina told a story about a friend in Wisconsin who used Dashboard to target just two voters in his neighborhood, one to chase after a stray absentee ballot and another that provided specific talking points. He explained his friend was able to help get the absentee ballot in the mail, and after using the specific talking points walked away feeling encouraged he had won another voter over. That was possible because of the size of Obamas grass-roots operation, Messina said. This has to be about the grass roots, we have to go back and run a campaign about the grassroots, Messina said Obama told him. We built the biggest grass-roots campaign We built the kind of campaign that made people want to volunteer. 6. Independents are not swing voters The old adage is that independents truly swing between the parties. And that if they havent made their mind up by Election Day, theyll be more likely to go to the challenger. But Messina insists those days are over.

The campaign went through and individually scored every voter in swing states based on their voting history, past support and likelihood to support Obama again, Messina said. Much of the data used for scoring was based on door-knocking (How fast did they slam the door?) and phone calls by the campaign, he added. We ended up being able to build support scores for every voter in battleground states from 1 to 100, Messina said. Instead, Messina argued that the new swing voter is truly a moderate. And many of the unaffiliated independents are former Republicans who left the party unhappy with the tea party takeover. Because of that, Messina said part of the Republican post-election soul-searching will involve looking at those groups, like Hispanics, that the GOP lost. The future demographics in this country are changing in a way thats going to make their current electoral math difficult for them if they dont, Messina said of the Republicans. 7. Early voting is important Messina knew Obama was going to win a few days before Election Day. Early voting totals confirmed Obama was the favorite, and pre-Election Day ballots are going to be increasingly crucial as more states adopt them, Messina said. First, the campaign set out to register thousands of new voters, Messina said. Then it set out to have historic early voting turnout. We ran a huge field campaign on the ground to do this, he said. We could see our electorate early voting at the rates needed. We started to say if thats true, were going to be OK. 8. Message matters Through all of the lauding of Obamas precision voter micro-targeting and reams of data, Messina insisted that none of that would have mattered without a compelling message and messenger. The messenger matters, and we had a better messenger, Messina said. And for each voter who used the Dashboard system or encouraged their friends to vote through Facebook, it was because they supported Obama, not some data program. You can build a whole suite of analytics but it all comes back to the campaign, it all comes back to having a message that matters, Messina said. Even with the most sophisticated voter outreach programs in the world that can identify that one voter who might be sympathetic to Obama in one town in Ohio, it wouldnt matter if the campaign couldnt reach them. What campaigns are evolving to is the campaigns of the past, door-knocking is going to be more important than ever, Messina argued. That fact makes figuring out how to most effectively use data in the future more complicated, Messina said. He said that it doesnt make sense to just sell a campaigns data to the next candidate or the party because that candidate wouldnt have the same connection to voters, rendering the date potentially useless.

The Obama campaign tried to transfer their organization to congressional candidates in the 2010 midterm races but found that it didnt work. We learned this to our surprise in 2010, you cant just hand it to the next candidate, they have to their own connection, Messina said. I dont think the president is in the business of selling things. 9. Romney wasnt the best GOP candidate Messina cited a number of problems with the Romney campaign, most importantly with the candidate himself. Asked who he thought would have been the strongest general election foe against Obama, Messina answered: I think we were honest about our concerns about Huntsman, and I think Jon Huntsman would have been a top-tier election candidate. Huntsman served Obama as U.S. ambassador to China and briefly ran for the GOP nod before dropping out after the New Hampshire primary. As someone who helped manage his nomination for ambassador, hes a good guy, Messina said. When asked by POLITICOs Mike Allen if political reasons helped motivate Obamas appointment of him as ambassador, Messina demurred. I thought he was a committed American who would serve our country well and he did, Messina said. Messina didnt cite the Romney campaigns failure to answer the summer attack ads as the biggest mistake made by the Republican. Instead, he pointed to the television ad they ran in Ohio claiming Jeep was sending jobs to China. They ended up spending the last 14 days of the election on the defense, and day after day they had to answer for their ad, Messina said. As for picking Paul Ryan, Messina insisted that the vice presidential nominee did little to help the candidate in states where it mattered, pointing out that Obama won the Republican congressmans hometown. I do think he added something to the national ticket Romney didnt have, Messina said. 10. Obama for America has a future The future of Obama for America the official name of the campaign remains a question mark, Messina said. By law, the campaign itself has to be dismantled and campaign funds cant be spent for non-campaign expenses. But Messina envisions a world where the campaign apparatus still plays a role. Messina appeared to dismiss heading back to the White House, where he already served as deputy chief of staff. But he left open the possibility of remaining with a Chicago political operation. Its likely such an operation would try to use its organizational strength to back the presidents agenda, he said. The campaign conducted a survey of supporters to ask what they would like to see the operation focus on. After the 2008 election, the campaign held online town hall meetings to get a similar sense of what supporters wanted and Messina said some of the results pushed them to enter fights that he was otherwise inclined to stay out of.

Like get involved in local elections and recall elections in Wisconsin because our people wanted us to, Messina said. But regardless, he sees a future for the grass-roots operation. You cant run two presidential campaigns from the grass roots and say now were going to run this from D.C., Messina said. Washington Post: Democrats Push to Redeploy Obamas Voter Database http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/democrats-push-to-redeploy-obamas-voterdatabase/2012/11/20/d14793a4-2e83-11e2-89d4-040c9330702a_story.html Craig Timberg and Amy Gardner November 20, 2012 If you voted this election season, President Obama almost certainly has a file on you. His vast campaign database includes information on voters magazine subscriptions, car registrations, housing values and hunting licenses, along with scores estimating how likely they were to cast ballots for his reelection. And although the election is over, Obamas database is just getting started. Democrats are pressing to expand and redeploy the most sophisticated voter list in history, beginning with next years gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey and extending to campaigns for years to come. The prospect already has some Republicans worried. Its always hard to play catch-up, said Peter Pasi, a Republican direct marketer who worked on Rick Santorums presidential primary campaign. It can be done by 2016. Im much more doubtful it can happen by 2014. The database consists of voting records and political donation histories bolstered by vast amounts of personal but publicly available consumer data, say campaign officials and others familiar with the operation. It could record hundreds of pieces of information for each voter. Campaign workers added far more detail through a broad range of voter contacts in person, on the phone, via e-mail or through visits to the campaigns Web site. Those who used its Facebook app, for example, had their files updated with lists of their Facebook friends, along with scores measuring the intensity of those relationships and whether they lived in swing states. If their last names sounded Hispanic, a key target group for the campaign, the database recorded that, too. The result was a digital operation far more elaborate than the one mounted by Obamas Republican rival, Mitt Romney, who collected less data and deployed it less effectively, officials from both parties say. To maintain their advantage, Democrats say they must navigate the inevitable intraparty squabbles over who gets access now that the unifying forces of a billion-dollar presidential campaign are gone. If this is all we do with this technology, I think it will be a wasted opportunity, said Michael Slaby, the Obama campaigns chief integration and innovation officer. Tests of whether Obamas database can be successfully redeployed will come even sooner. Terence R. McAuliffe, a party insider who ran unsuccessfully for governor of Virginia in 2009, has inquired about the data for his gubernatorial campaign next year, say those familiar with the conversations.

We have been communicating to Obama for America all along about the importance of receiving that data, since Virginia has a 2013 election, said Brian Moran, the outgoing chairman of the Virginia Democratic Party. Although McAuliffe is the early Democratic front-runner, many in the party say individual candidates should receive access to such data only after winning the nomination something that in Virginia cant happen before the June primary, leaving only a few months before the November general election. The short time frame may make a full data set, should McAuliffe get it, even more valuable. All Democratic candidates have access to the partys lists, which include voting and donation histories along with some consumer data. What Obamas database adds are the more fine-grained analyses of what issues matter most to voters and how best to motivate them to donate, volunteer and vote. But there are serious logistical challenges to keeping updated a database as large and as detailed as Obamas, which is why campaign officials are debating how to proceed even though there is wide agreement on the desire to help fellow Democrats and like-minded independent groups. Slaby, the campaign official, said the database in the near term could be used to organize support for the presidents legislative agenda but eventually might go to the Democratic National Committee or Obamas presidential library committee once it is established. Or, he said, it could go to a group created to nurture and deploy the database most effectively. No existing group has the technical resources to manage the data, he said. Slaby said of Obama, A lot of this will rest on him and what he wants his legacy and the legacy of this organization to mean. The database powered nearly everything about Obamas campaign, including fundraising, identifying likely supporters and urging them to vote. This resulted in an operational edge that helped a candidate with a slim margin in the overall national vote to trounce Romney in the state-by-state electoral college contests. Obama was able to collect and use personal data largely free of the restrictions that govern similar efforts by private companies. Neither the Federal Trade Commission, which has investigated the handling of personal data by Google, Facebook and other companies, nor the Federal Election Commission has jurisdiction over how campaigns use such information, officials at those agencies say. Privacy advocates say the opportunity for abuse by Obama, Romney or any other politicians campaign is serious, as is the danger of hackers stealing the data. Voters who willingly gave campaigns such information may not have understood that it would be passed on to the party or other candidates, even though disclosures on Web sites and Facebook apps warn of that possibility. Chris Soghoian, an analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union and a former FTC technologist, said voters should worry that the interests of politicians and commercial data brokers have aligned, making legal restrictions of data collection less likely. Theyre going to be loath to regulate those companies if they are relying on them to target voters, he said. Slaby said the campaign took great care with the data it collected and will ensure that whoever takes it over will protect it. Such efforts, though, take unusual resources, he said. Building the campaigns technological

systems took nearly two years and, at their peak, involved about 120 paid employees working with data provided by hundreds of thousands of volunteers. Republicans once held the edge in using technology to identify and motivate voters. After Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) lost to President George W. Bush in 2004, Democrats invested in building better voter lists and developing a new generation of political operatives skilled in the science of persuasion and motivation. Although Obamas 2008 election was hailed for its technological advances, campaign officials acknowledge that the operation fell far short of its hype. With the benefit of four years of lead time, the campaign was determined to make better use of increasingly sophisticated technology. Driving this was Obamas data-minded campaign manager, Jim Messina. Among his mentors was Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, who was a regular visitor to what many have said resembled an Internet start-up company within the Chicago campaign headquarters. The campaign invested heavily in engineers and technologists, including many who had never worked in politics, and used Amazon Web Services to host the voter database on its cloud servers. The key was a program the campaign built called Narwhal after a predatory whale whose single tusk makes it look a bit like a fat, finned unicorn that consolidated lists of voters and donors, often collected over years by state party officials and campaigns. Narwhal allowed related pieces of software, such as those used by field organizers and call center workers, to draw on the information in the voter database and continually update it. Slaby and others from the campaign said that although it relied on detailed analyses of cable television viewing habits and Web traffic, personal information from those sources was made anonymous and did not flow back into the voter database. The most important information, officials said, was provided by voters themselves whenever they had contact with the campaign, in person or online, enriching the database with e-mail addresses, cellphone numbers and, crucially, information about what issues most concerned them. This allowed the campaigns analysts to test the effectiveness of messages aimed at narrow demographic slices single women in their 30s worried about health care, for example. Although it was often described as micro-targeting, Slaby said the most important element was what he called micro-listening. If people tell us theyre interested in cats, we probably took that down, he said. Time: Friended: How the Obama Campaign Connected with Young Voters http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/20/friended-how-the-obama-campaign-connected-with-youngvoters/?iid=sl-main-lead Michael Scherer November 20, 2012 In the final weeks before Election Day, a scary statistic emerged from the databases at Barack Obamas Chicago headquarters: half the campaigns targeted swing-state voters under age 29 had no listed phone number. They lived in the cellular shadows, effectively immune to traditional get-out-the-vote efforts.

For a campaign dependent on a big youth turnout, this could have been a crisis. But the Obama team had a solution in place: a Facebook application that will transform the way campaigns are conducted in the future. For supporters, the app appeared to be just another way to digitally connect to the campaign. But to the Windy City number crunchers, it was a game changer. I think this will wind up being the most groundbreaking piece of technology developed for this campaign, says Teddy Goff, the Obama campaigns digital director. Thats because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists. Whats more, Facebook offered an ideal way to reach them. People dont trust campaigns. They dont even trust media organizations, says Goff. Who do they trust? Their friends. The campaign called this effort targeted sharing. And in those final weeks of the campaign, the team blitzed the supporters who had signed up for the app with requests to share specific online content with specific friends simply by clicking a button. More than 600,000 supporters followed through with more than 5 million contacts, asking their friends to register to vote, give money, vote or look at a video designed to change their mind. A geek squad in Chicago created models from vast data sets to find the best approaches for each potential voter. We are not just sending you a banner ad, explains Dan Wagner, the Obama campaigns 29year-old head of analytics, who helped oversee the project. We are giving you relevant information from your friends. Early tests of the system found statistically significant changes in voter behavior. People whose friends sent them requests to register to vote and to vote early, for example, were more likely to do so than similar potential voters who were not contacted. That confirmed a trend already noted in political-science literature: online social networks have the power to change voting behavior. A study of 61 million people on Facebook during the 2010 midterms found that people who saw photos of their friends voting on Election Day were more likely to cast a ballot themselves. It is much more effective to stimulate these real-world ties, says James Fowler, a professor at the University of California at San Diego, who co-authored the study. Campaign pros have known this for years. A phone call or knock on the door from someone who lives in your neighborhood is far more effective than appeals from out-of-state volunteers or robo-calls. Before social networks like Facebook, however, connecting a supportive friend to a would-be voter was a challenge. Email, for instance, connects one person to a campaign. Facebook can connect the campaign, through one person, to 500 or more friends. Because it took more than a year to build the system, it was deployed only in the campaigns homestretch. The Romney team used a far less sophisticated version of the technology. Political strategists on both sides say that in the future they intend to get the system working sooner in primaries in key states and with more buy-in from supporters, who will have a greater understanding of their role in the process. Campaigns are trying to engineer what the new door knock is going to look like and what the next phone call is going to look like, says Patrick Ruffini, a Republican digital strategist who worked on George W. Bushs 2004 campaign. We are starting to see. And the technology is moving fast. In 2008, Twitter was a sideshow and Facebook had about one-sixth its current reach in the U.S. By 2016, this sort of campaign-driven sharing over social networks is almost certain to be the norm. Tell your friends. ArsTechnica: How Team Obama's Tech Efficiency Left Romney IT In Dust http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/how-team-obamas-tech-efficiency-left-romney-it-

in-dust/ By Sean Gallagher November 20, 2012 Despite running a campaign with about twice the money and twice the staff of Governor Mitt Romney's presidential bid, President Barack Obama's campaign under-spent Romney's on IT products and services by $14.5 million, putting the money instead into building an internal tech team. Based on an Ars analysis of Federal Election Commission filings, the Obama campaign, all-inclusive, spent $9.3 million on technology services and consulting and under $2 million on internal technology-related payroll. The bottom line is that the Obama campaign's emphasis on people over capital and use of open-source tools to develop and operate its sophisticated cloud-based infrastructure ended up actually saving the campaign money. As Scott VanDenPlas, lead DevOps for Obama for America put it in an e-mail interview with Ars, "A lesson which we took to heart from 2008 [was that] operational efficiency is an enormous strategic advantage." As we revealed in our recent analysis of the Romney team's tech strategy, the Romney campaign spent $23.6 million on outside technology servicesmost of it on outside "digital media" consulting and data management. It outsourced most of its basic IT operations, while the Obama campaign did the opposite buying hardware and software licenses, and hiring its own IT department. Just how much emphasis the Obama campaign put on IT is demonstrated by the fact that the campaign's most highly paid staff member was its Chief Integration and Innovation Officer, Michael Slaby, with an annualized salary of about $130,000. By comparison, Kevin Rekowski, the Romney campaign's Director of Technology, was barely in the top 20 salaries of the Romney campaign, with an annualized salary of $80,000. Zac Moffatt, Romney's Digital Director a social media planner, not a technology expertwas number five, at $175,000 a year, in addition to whatever he earned from hiring his own firm, Targeted Victory, to handle much of the Romney campaign's digital strategy. But the advantage of having a personal army of coders wasn't just financial. "Campaigns are serious tests of your creativity and foresight," VanDenPlas explained. "They are unpredictable, agile, and shortan 18 month, $1 billion, essentially disposable organization. Hackers can thrive in an environment like that, to a point where I'm not sure anyone else really can. Everything is over far too quickly to get boring." Smart, not perfect The strategy the Obama campaign's DevOps team used to manage the ever-growing number of applications deployed by the campaign was to "choose the lowest cost route to get us the most resultsbasically, be smart, not perfect," VanDenPlas said. "We did a lot of work to make things simple, and when you have a team that is unfazed by limitations, you get some really amazing and creative solutions, some of which I hope to see come out as open sourced projects here shortly." Key in maximizing the value of the Obama campaign's IT spending was its use of open source tools and open architectures. Linuxparticularly Ubuntuwas used as the server operating system of choice. "We were technology agnostic, and used the right technology for the right purpose," VanDenPlas said. "Someone counted nearly 10 distinct DBMS/NoSQL systems, and we wrote something like 200 apps in Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, and Node.js." It also helped that the campaign, at least for internally developed applications, relied almost exclusively on Amazon Web Service for its infrastructure, eliminating a lot of the financial burden of infrastructure management. "For the applications built by the OFA [Obama for America] technology team, 99.999 percent

were AWS hosted," VanDenPlas said, "purely because it was the best fit for what we were doing. As a whole, if you include privately hosted virtualized environments in the cloud architecture definition, I believe everything was 'cloud,' even down to our development environments running inside of Vagrant on our laptops." The system configurations for the campaign's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances were created using the Puppet configuration management tool and were built as Debian packages kept in the campaign's own Advanced Packaging Tool (apt) repositoryboth for internally developed and third-party applications. As the number of applications and the scale of the campaign's AWS infrastructure use climbed, the DevOps team shifted to using Asgardan open-source tool developed by Netflix to manage cloud deployments. To help optimize applications, the OFA technology team used New Relic, a tool also used by the Romney campaign. "It is really a fantastic tool that increases your visibility into where your applications are spending time," VanDenPlas said. "They support the major languages we used (Python, Ruby, PHP) as well as the frameworks (Flask, Rails, Kohana)." While AWS's tools were used for performance monitoring and to trigger automatic scaling-up of capacity, VanDenPlas said, much of the monitoring was handled by a suite of commercial and open source tools and home-grown code, "consisting of Cacti, Opsview, StatsD, Graphite, and Seyren, and a number of custom applications that continued to evolve right up until Election Day," VanDenPlas said. To get better aggregated alerting and metric data, the team built a lightweight plugin for Nagios (the opensource basis of Opsview) in Python based on boto (the Python programming interface to AWS's services) and dotCloud's ZeroRPC messaging interface. "Using this," VanDenPlas explained, "we could constantly query thousands of nodes for near real-time statistics and feed them right back into the same alerting and monitoring system (Nagios) we used elsewhere." Other performance monitoring and user experience data was collected using Chartbeat and Google Analytics. "Akamai also provided very useful statistics and logging," VanDenPlas said, "but these were mostly contextual rather than actionable." But, he added, the most heavily used monitoring system was "our community of internal and external supporters. The human factor in monitoring is huge. There are countless incidents where (OFA User Support Director) Brady Kriss notified us of pending problems derived from community help tickets." The armor-plated cloud The OFA engineering team also did a lot of work to ensure that they got the most out of Amazon's cloud architecture in terms of resiliency. As the election approached and the infrastructure demands surged, the engineering team took advantage of Amazon's multiple availability zones within its Virgina data center. "We built out a triply redundant, encrypted, and compressed WAN optimized tunnel between AWS regions," VanDenPlas said, "using a combination of OpenVPN, CloudOptimizer, and some DNS trickery." The team shifted its domain name service to Amazon's Route 53 service, which uses latency-based routing to direct users to the host running in the AWS availability region with the shortest network trip time. That allowed the Obama team's application deployments to use "regionless" generic configuration settings, making deployments much simpler. The centerpiece of the whole Obama campaign was its fundraising capabilities, without which all of the other applications may have been moot. The 2012 campaign's online donation system was a complete rebuild from the 2008 effort, VanDenPlas said, "a multi-region, geolocated, three facility processor capable of a per

second transaction count sufficiently high enough that we failed to be able to reach it in load testing. It could also operate if every other dependent service had failed, including its own database and every vendor." The Obama campaign's websites were also hosted on Amazon and hardened. The campaign's engineers built an application that created static HTML snapshots of the sites stored in Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3); in the event of a Web server failure, requests would be instantly directed to the latest snapshot. All of that redundancy was given an extra workout in the week before the election as Hurricane Sandy approached the East Coast. VanDenPlas said that a "complete hot replica of our entire infrastructure" was deployed to Amazon's primary West Coast data center in under 24 hours as a precaution. Build, borrow, or buy The tech team wasn't the only internal IT operation at Obama for America. The campaign ran its own data analysis shop and had its own army of Web designers and administrators. And with a payroll of over 1,000 people, the IT team had a lot of tech to support for an organization that had essentially a 24-month lifecycle. That meant buying a lot of hardware and software. CDW, based outside of Chicago, was the go-to supplier for much of the campaign's computer equipment and boxed software purchases. Microsoft also sold $522,210 worth of software licenses to the campaignwhich averages out to just under $500 per staffer. With its investment in the cloud, the Obama campaign's Web hosting costs were much higher than Romney's. The largest cost, however, was content hosted by Blue State Digital, the social media and interactive advertising agency; the cost for hosting the internally developed applications in the Amazon cloud was a quarter of that. And then there was the Obama campaign's outside technology help. As mentioned in our previous coverage of the Obama campaign, advertising company Blue State Digital and campaign software provider NGP VAN provided the largest chunks of Obama for America's technology consulting, and are most directly comparable to the over $14 million paid out by the Romney campaign to its digital firm, Targeted Victory. Even taken with the software and Web hosting expenses, the Obama campaign spent a seventh of what the Romney campaign spent on digital and an even smaller fraction of what Romney spent on voter and donor contact. Return on investment In the end, the deciding factor wasn't what the Obama campaign spent money on, but what it did with all that money. Insourcing gave the campaign a strategic flexibility that the Romney campaign lacked, as well as other intangibles that may have contributed to leading an efficient campaign. And the reduced reliance on outside consultants allowed the Obama campaign to direct capital toward places where it had a bigger impactsuch as in advertising, where the Obama campaign outspent Romney by a factor of 5 to 1. "This is the difference," VanDenPlas said, "between a well run professional machine and a gaggle of amateurs, posing in true Rumsfeldian fashion, who 'don't know what they don't know.' I would be shocked if such a chasm exists next cycle between the partiesthese arent mistakes to be repeated if you want to do things like win elections." Given the response from Republican partisans to the failure of Romney's campaign and to the apparent failure of its technology investments, the stakes for the next timethe mid-term elections in 2014, and the next presidential race in 2016will be that much higher for Republican campaigns. It's doubtful they'll ignore the lessons learned this campaign season.

Tech President: How Obama for America made its Facebook friends into effective advocates http://techpresident.com/news/23159/how-obama-america-made-its-facebook-friends-effective-advocates Nick Judd November 19, 2012 People involved in Obama for America's digital and technology operations say one of the biggest takeaways from the 2012 campaign is the success of a new kind of peer-to-peer digital persuasion tool referred to internally as "targeted sharing." Well before the campaign reached fever pitch, OfA chief data scientist Rayid Ghani and analyst Matt Rattigan brought the technology team a prototype piece of software. The prototype used a script to check a given supporter's Facebook friends list against what the campaign knew about those friends. The campaign could use the merged data to create arbitrary scores that indicated which of a user's Facebook friends the campaign would like to present with a given piece of content. Obama for America could use it over and over again to make it more likely that people fitting certain profiles would be likely to see content targeted to them spilling into their newsfeeds, from the campaign, through their friends' Facebook posts. By the end of 2011, the campaign had already decided what approach to existing voter turnout or new voter registration it needed in order to win each swing state. Obama for America planned digital campaigns based on what it needed to accomplish whatever the task at hand would be. For example, those above-the-fold ad buys on the front page of the the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's or Columbus Dispatch's websites to drive the early voting that the campaign believed was crucial to victory in Wisconsin and Ohio. People in techPresident headquarters in New York saw advertisements on NYTimes.com that were most likely intended to convert viewers into donors. The prototype produced by Ghani and Rattigan would allow OfA Digital to be far more precise about what kind of content they were asking supporters to share around the web as well. The only problem was that the prototype could not work at the necessary scale. Ghani and Rattigan's script took 45 minutes to run per person not nearly fast enough. But anyone who opted to use Facebook single sign-on for an Obama for America web property was prompted to authorize the OfA Facebook application to connect to their account. Single sign-on users also gave OfA permission to glean all the data it needed to decide which content that user should be asked to share and guess who that user should share it with. In part because it linked the two, OfA was able to build up a user base of nearly 1 million people for its Facebook app by election day making the potential gains for targeted sharing well worth some time and effort. OfA developers went to work, and by midsummer the tech team had targeted sharing working in production and in real time. By the end of the campaign, says Obama for America analytics chief Dan Wagner, the click-through rate on a targeted share was more than twice as high as the rate for a banner ad. Thanks to a convergence of three different teams analytics, digital, and tech the campaign had developed a tool that staff believe delivered empirically higher results for the re-elect using social media. In a campaign year full of hype and flashy social media toys, that's a big, bold claim. Applying the same principles to get out the vote, Obama for America asked its supporters who had been signed up for the OfA Facebook application to pick potential voters from among their friends in swing states and urge them to get to the ballot box or register to vote. In the final days before the election and on election day, the application flooded its users with notifications asking them to reach out on the campaign's behalf. Officials told Time's Michael Scherer that a staggering 20 percent of people asked by their friends to register, vote or take another activity went ahead and did it. While the campaign hasn't shared how many

people elected to press the case for Obama on Facebook in this way, and this is only remarkable if enough people participated to help close the distance for OfA in voter registrations and turnout where it had those goals, the success rate is high enough to raise eyebrows. Behind the Facebook application driving get out the vote was the same targeted sharing code. Targeted sharing was for more than just Facebook, too. Tech team member Will St. Clair, who worked on the code, says that it was a piece of back-end infrastructure. The piece he worked on retrieved those voter scores and made them available to different departments any department so it could be used to inform a targeted email, too, for example. It's unclear what happens next for this code or any of the other innovations built in-house for the Obama campaign. Democrats now seem to be weighing the cost of keeping some aspects of their new codebase maintained and functional against its potential utility in the election cycles to come. The software belongs to Obama for America, and could, in theory, be transferred to the Democratic National Committee, as OfA's email list was moved to Organizing for America after 2008 and made part of the DNC. The Daily Beast: The story behind the most viral photo ever http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/19/the-story-behind-the-most-viral-photo-ever.html Brian Ries November 19, 2012 You've probably seen it by now. Michelle Obama, wearing a red-and-white patterned dress, stands with her back to the camera. Her arms are wrapped around her husband, whose face is relaxed, his eyes closed, the hints of a smile lingering on the edges of his lips. Four more years, reads the text accompanying the photograph, which was posted on the Obama campaigns Facebook and Twitter accounts around 11:15 p.m. on election nightjust as it became clear the president had won a second term. That photo, taken by a campaign photographer just a few days into the job in mid-August, has broken all sorts of Internet records. With more than 816,000 retweets as of Sunday, its the most shared picture in the history of Twitter, beating out entries from Justin Bieber and the fast-food chain Wendys. It's also the mostliked photograph ever to be shared on Facebook, amassing almost 4.5 million likes since Election Day. And its sure to be the photo most everyone with an Internet connection will remember seeing as they heard that Barack Obamafor better or for worsewould reside for four more years at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The photographer, Scout Tufankjian, says it captures the Obamas deep love and respect for one another. But, perhaps surprisingly for a campaign with a deep love for data, where even the subject lines of emails were formulated based on intense rounds of numbers-backed analysis, the selection of the four more years photograph was a decision made on the fly. It was chosen by a 31-year-old digital operative who had been up since 4 in the morning. She was completely exhausted. Laura Olin grew up outside Washington, D.C., where she was one of those kids who just fell into politics, studied politics at school, and then went off to graduate school to study even more politics. After two years working at Blue State Digital, the D.C.-based tech consultancy thats served as a farm team for Barack Obama the past five years, Olin joined the Obama campaign in March 2011before anything actually had started, she says. As the first digital staffer there, she started out doing everythingediting emails, the blog, and the socialmedia work. Eventually she was joined by three othersAbby Aronofsky, Jessi Langsen, and Alex Wallwho

together oversaw the Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, and Spotify accounts for Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and the first lady. All of our decisions were made in-house, says Olin, who led the new social-media team, in her first extensive interview since Obamas victory. We weren't getting direct directives from the White House. As things came up, or when they knew something big was going to happen, the digital staffers would work to spread the messages in the voices established for each of the accounts. Joe Biden did lots of veterans stuff, a lot of, you know, middle-class families, blue-collar workers, first responders, stuff like that, Olin explains of the Facebook posts and tweets they would send. Michelle Obama was a lot about education, obviously women, health, and nutrition. The medium mattered, too. With Tumblr, for examplewhere Obamas blog has been called the best campaign Tumblr the world will probably ever seethe campaign targeted younger people who don't care about Social Security. Whereas on Facebook, Olin says, they could target a post to users over the age of 55 who had liked Barack Obama's page and, because of their age, were presumably interested in Social Security. We would take advantage of that a lot, Olin says. It was picking and choosing where we thought people would respond best. But being that close to the megaphone, where millions of peopleand a ravenous pressawait your every tweet, post, or pin, one must have an astute sense of caution and careful footing. Youre one grammatical error away from a news cycles relentless mockery. It was kind of terrifying, actually. My team ran the Barack Obama Twitter handle, which I think was probably most susceptible to really embarrassing and silly mistakes. We didnt ever really have one, which I still cant believe WE pulled off. Olin credits a rigorous process of choosing people who not only knew their socialmedia shit, but who were also diligent and fanatical about fact-checking and accuracy. It got to be exhausting, she says. But Im really proud that we avoided a really embarrassing Amercia situation, referring to the iPhone app produced by the Romney campaign that invited users tp snap a photo of themselves in Romneys Amercialeading to days and days of mockery. Obamas team had their own close calls, too, but nothing that got published, Olin says. As for her teams reaction to Amercia gaffe? There were definitely dances being danced. It was a good day. Of course, no day would be as momentous, or as exhausting for the young digital staffers at Obamas Chicago headquarters, as Election Day. After months of hard-fought 14-16 hour daysand six- or seven-day weeksObamas digital team gathered at campaign headquarters starting at 4 a.m. on Nov. 6. Staffers prepared themselves for what many believed was going to be a long night, with the election perhaps remaining undecided until late in the eveningor worse. Weeks of planning went into that, Olin explained, detailing the dry runs the campaign underwent in the weeks before Election Day to make sure they had the entire process down pat. Half the team would be focusing on pre-planned strategy, the others dealing with breaking developments. So when they would get reports of voting irregularities or polling place changes in key states, for example, they could launch a series of targeted Facebook posts or tweets encouraging people to stay in line or find their new polling place. No one expected a result before 2 a.m. And no one had planned what their victory messaging would be. "I'm kinda superstitious," Olin explains. "I refused to think about victory stuff, just because you know, 'the wrath from high atop the thing,' as The West Wing goes." But avoiding the "wrath," of course, meant the young staffers who sat with their fingers on the proverbial triggers lacked a plan for when they got

Laura Olin describes the process that led to the now famous photograph. "One of my team members, Jessi Langsen, remembered that there was an amazing photo of the president and first lady hugging at the president's very last campaign rally in Des Moines, and it's this really beautiful photo at night of them. They're kind of on the side of the photograph, and the only thing is that Michelle was facing forward and the president was facing away from the camera. So my boss Teddy Goff made the very good point that we should see the president's face." A good point indeed. That's when she remembered the campaign photographer had taken a series of great hug photographs at another Iowa rally earlier in the summer. "I went to our photo editor and I was like, 'Remember when Michelle was wearing that checkered dress in Iowa?' And she was like, 'Yes!'" Goff approved, the team wrote a couple of captions, and "four more years" was chosen as the winner. CNN called Iowa at 11:10 p.m. ET. The Obama tweet was posted six minutes later. The last remaining staffers then ran off to the victory party at McCormick Place to catch the president's speech. It wouldn't be until the next morning when they realized just how well it had been received. None of us looked at how the posts were doing until I opened my laptop the next morning. It had, at that point, about 3 million likes," Olin says of the Facebook post. She suspected that might be a new record. "I think it was just a combination of the moment, she says now, and just kinda lucking into a photo that people loved that I think showed the emotion and the relief. Plus, she says, everyone loves the president and his first lady together. Like her counterparts at the campaign, Tufankjian, the photographer, had no idea of the photographs popularity until well after its first million likes. I was like, Remember when Michelle was wearing that checkered dress in Iowa? And she was like, Yes! I had no idea the response was going to be like this," she admitted to Boston.com. "My friend emailed me on election night to tell me and I didnt believe her. I said, No way, thats crazy, and I looked it up and was like, Wow. I had no idea about the Facebook thing until the next day. The whole thing is incredible. Its been two weeks since Barack Obama was reelected President of the United States, and Olin is still in the campaigns Chicago headquarters, camped out with a small skeleton crew working on what the campaign is calling "the wind-down." Theyre focused on Congressional lame-duck initiatives and just making sure people know the president's all in to prevent middle-class tax hikes. She'll be there until January. After that? "I know that I'm moving to Brooklyn and getting a dog, so, those are two things on the list." Asked if she had any words of wisdom for her defeated counterparts at the Romney campaign, Olin says Republicans need to get better at communicating on social media. "If I were them I would get better at talking to people like people," she says. "I'm sure there are people, young Republicans, out there that get it." The Republican Party, Olin says, "needs to be brave enough to just let people who know their shit do what they do." But, she adds, its "totally fine if they don't." National Journal: How Obamas Tech Team Helped Win the Election http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/how-obama-s-tech-team-helped-win-the-election-20121116 Alexis Madrigal November 16, 2012

The Obama campaign's technologists were tense and tired. It was game day and everything was going wrong. Josh Thayer, the lead engineer of Narwhal, had just been informed that they'd lost another one of the services powering their software. That was bad: Narwhal was the code name for the data platform that underpinned the campaign and let it track voters and volunteers. If it broke, so would everything else. They were talking with people at Amazon Web Services, but all they knew was that they had packet loss. Earlier that day, they lost their databases, their East Coast servers, and their memcache clusters. Thayer was ready to kill Nick Hatch, a DevOps engineer who was the official bearer of bad news. Another of their vendors, StallionDB, was fixing databases but needed to rebuild the replicas. It was going to take time, Hatch said. They didn't have time. They had been working 14-hour days, six or seven days a week, trying to reelect the president, and now everything had been broken at just the wrong time. It was like someone had written a Murphy's Law algorithm and deployed it at scale. And that was the point. "Game day" was Oct. 21. The election was still 17 days away, and this was a live action role playing (LARPing!) exercise that the campaign's chief technology officer, Harper Reed, was inflicting on his team. "We worked through every possible disaster situation," Reed said. "We did three actual all-day sessions of destroying everything we had built." Hatch was playing the role of dungeon master, calling out devilishly complex scenarios that were designed to test each and every piece of their system as they entered the exponential traffic-growth phase of the election. Mark Trammell, an engineer who Reed hired after he left Twitter, saw a couple of game days. He said they reminded him of his time in the Navy. "You ran firefighting drills over and over and over, to make sure that you not just know what you're doing," he said, "but you're calm because you know you can handle your sh--." The team had elite and, for tech, senior talent--by which I mean that most of them were in their 30s--from Twitter, Google, Facebook, Craigslist, Quora, and some of Chicago's own software companies such as Orbitz and Threadless, where Reed had been CTO. But even these people, maybe especially these people, knew enough about technology not to trust it. "I think the Republicans f----- up in the hubris department," Reed told me. "I know we had the best technology team I've ever worked with, but we didn't know if it would work. I was incredibly confident it would work. I was betting a lot on it. We had time. We had resources. We had done what we thought would work, and it still could have broken. Something could have happened." In fact, the day after the Oct. 21 game day, Amazon services--on which the whole campaign's tech presence was built--went down. "We didn't have any downtime because we had done that scenario already," Reed said. Hurricane Sandy hit on another game day, Oct. 29, threatening the campaign's whole East Coast infrastructure. "We created a hot backup of all our applications to U.S.-west in preparation for U.S.-east to go down hard," Reed said. "We knew what to do," Reed maintained, no matter what the scenario was. "We had a runbook that said if this happens, you do this, this, and this. They did not do that with Orca." The New Chicago Machine vs. the Grand Old Party

Orca was supposed to be the Republican answer to Obama's perceived tech advantage. In the days leading up to the election, the Romney campaign pushed its (not-so) secret weapon as the answer to the Democrats' vaunted ground game. Orca was going to allow volunteers at polling places to update the Romney camp's database of voters in real time as people cast their ballots. That would supposedly allow them to deploy resources more efficiently and wring every last vote out of Florida, Ohio, and the other battleground states. The product got its name, a Romney spokesperson told NPR, because orcas are the only known predator of the one-tusked narwhal. The billing the Republicans gave the tool confused almost everyone inside the Obama campaign. Narwhal wasn't an app for a smartphone. It was the architecture of the company's sophisticated data operation. Narwhal unified what Obama for America knew about voters, canvassers, event-goers, and phone-bankers, and it did it in real time. From the descriptions of the Romney camp's software that were available then and now, Orca was not even in the same category as Narwhal. It was like touting the iPad as a Facebook killer, or comparing a GPS device to an engine. And besides, in the scheme of a campaign, a digitized strike list is cool, but it's not, like, a game changer. It's just a nice thing to have. So, it was with more than a hint of schadenfreude that Reed's team hears that Orca crashed early on Election Day. Later reports posted by rank-and-file volunteers describe chaos descending on the polling locations as only a fraction of the tens of thousands of volunteers organized for the effort were able to use it properly to turn out the vote. Of course, they couldn't snicker too loudly. Obama's campaign had created a similar app in 2008 called Houdini. As detailed in Sacha Issenberg's groundbreaking book, Victory Lab, Houdini's rollout went great until about 9:30 a.m. on the day of the election. Then it crashed in much the same way that Orca did. In 2012, Democrats had a new version, built by the vendor NGP VAN. It was called Gordon, after the man who killed Houdini. But the 2008 failure, among other needs, drove the 2012 Obama team to bring technologists in-house. With Election Day bearing down on them, they knew they could not go down. And yet they had to accommodate much more strain on the systems as interest in the election picked up toward the end, as it always does. Mark Trammell, who worked for Twitter during its period of exponential growth, thought it would have been easy for the Obama team to fall into many of the pitfalls that the social network did back then. But while the problems of scaling both technology and culture quickly might have been similar, the stakes were much higher. A fail whale (cough) in the days leading up to or on Nov. 6 would have been neither charming nor funny. In a race that at least some people thought might be very close, it could have cost the president the election. And, of course, the team's only real goal was to elect the president. "We have to elect the president. We don't need to sell our software to Oracle," Reed told his team. But the secondary impact of their success or failure would be to prove that campaigns could effectively hire and deploy top-level programming talent. If they failed, it would be evidence that this stuff might be best left to outside political technology consultants, by whom the arena had long been handled. If Reed's team succeeded, engineers might become as enshrined in the mechanics of campaigns as social-media teams already are. We now know what happened. The grand technology experiment worked. So little went wrong that Trammell and Reed even had time to cook up a little pin to celebrate. It said, "YOLO," short for "You Only Live Once," with the Obama Os.

When Obama campaign chief Jim Messina signed off on hiring Reed, he told him, "Welcome to the team. Don't f--- it up." As Election Day ended and the dust settled, it was clear: Reed had not f----- it up. The campaign had turned out more volunteers and gotten more donors than in 2008. Sure, the field organization was more entrenched and experienced, but the difference stemmed in large part from better technology. The tech team's key products--Dashboard, the Call Tool, the Facebook Blaster, the PeopleMatcher, and Narwhal--made it simpler and easier for anyone to engage with the president's reelection effort. But it wasn't easy. Reed's team came in as outsiders to the campaign and, by most accounts, remained that way. The divisions among the tech, digital, and analytics team never quite got resolved, even if the end product has salved the sore spots that developed over the stressful months. At their worst, in early 2012, the cultural differences between tech and everybody else threatened to derail the whole grand experiment. By the end, the campaign produced exactly what it should have: a hybrid of the desires of everyone on Obama's team. They raised hundreds of millions of dollars online, made unprecedented progress in voter targeting, and built everything atop the most stable technical infrastructure of any presidential campaign. To go a step further, I'd even say that this clash of cultures was a good thing: The nerds shook up an ossifying Democratic tech structure, and the politicos taught the nerds a thing or two about stress, small-p politics, and the significance of elections. YOLO: Meet the Obama Campaign's Chief Technology Officer If you're a nerd, Harper Reed is an easy guy to like. He's brash and funny and smart. He gets you and where you came from. He, too, played with computers when they weren't cool, and learned to code because he just could not help himself. You could call out nouns, phenomena, and he'd be right there with you: BBS, warez, self-organizing systems, Rails, the quantified self, Singularity. He wrote his first programs at age 7, games that his mom typed into their Apple IIC. He, too, has a memory that all nerds share: Late at night, light from a chunky monitor illuminating his face, fingers flying across a keyboard, he figured something out. TV news segments about cybersecurity might look lifted straight from his memories, but the b-roll they shot of darkened rooms and typing hands could not convey the sense of exhilaration he felt when he built something that works. Harper Reed got the city of Chicago to create an open and real-time feed of its transit data by reverse engineering how they served bus location information. Why? Because it made his wife Hiromi's commute a little easier. Because it was fun to extract the data from the bureaucracy and make it available to anyone who wanted it. Because he is a nerd. Yet Reed has friends, such as the manager of the hip-hop club Empire who, when we walk into the place early on the Friday after the election, says, "Let me grab you a shot." Surprisingly, Harper Reed is a chilled vodka kind of guy. Unsurprisingly, Harper Reed read Steven Levy's Hackers as a kid. Surprisingly, the manager, who is tall and handsome with rock 'n'-roll hair flowing from beneath a red beanie, returns to show Harper photographs of his kids. They've known each other for a long while. They are really growing up. As the night rolls on, and the club starts to fill up, another friend approached us: DJ Hiroki, who was spinning that night. Harper Reed knows the DJ. Of course. And Hiroki grabs us another shot. (At this point I'm thinking, "By the end of the night, either I pass out or Reed tells me something good.") Hiroki's been DJing at Empire for years, since Harper Reed was the crazy guy you can see on his public Facebook photos. In one shot from 2006, a skinny Reed sits in a bathtub with a beer in his hand, two thick band tattoos running across his chest

and shoulders. He is not wearing any clothes. The caption reads, "Stop staring, it's not there i swear!" What makes Harper Reed different isn't just that the photo exists, but that he kept it public during the election. Yet if you've spent a lot of time around tech people, around Burning Man devotees, around startups, around San Francisco, around BBSs, around Reddit, Harper Reed probably makes sense to you. He's a cool hacker. He gets profiled by Mother Jones even though he couldn't talk with Tim Murphy, their reporter. He supports open source. He likes Japan. He says fuck a lot. He goes to hipster bars that serve vegan Mexican food, and where a quarter of the staff and clientele have mustaches. He may be like you, but he also juggles better than you, and is wilder than you, more fun than you, cooler than you. He's what a king of the nerds really looks like. Sure, he might grow a beard and put on a little potbelly, but he wouldn't tuck in his T-shirt. He is not that kind of nerd. Instead, he's got plugs in his ears and a shock of gloriously product-mussed hair and hipster glasses and he doesn't own a long-sleeve dress shirt, in case you were wondering. "Harper is an easy guy to underestimate because he looks funny. That might be part of his brand," said Chris Sacca, a well-known Silicon Valley venture capitalist and major Obama bundler who brought a team of more than a dozen technologists out for an Obama campaign hack day. Reed, for his part, has the kind of self-awareness that faces outward. His self-announced flaws bristle like quills. "I always look like a f------ idiot," Reed told me. "And if you look like an a------, you have to be really good." It was a lesson he learned early out in Greeley, Colo., where he grew up. "I had this experience where my dad hired someone to help him out because his network was messed up and he wanted me to watch. And this was at a very unfortunate time in my life where I was wearing very baggy pants and I had a Marilyn Manson shirt on and I looked like an a------. And my father took me aside and was like, 'Why do you look like an a------?' And I was like, 'I don't know. I don't have an answer.' But I realized I was just as good as the guys fixing it," Reed recalled. "And they didn't look like me and I didn't look like them. And if I'm going to do this, and look like an idiot, I have to step up. Like if we're all at zero, I have to be at 10 because I have this stupid mustache." And, in fact, he may actually be at 10. Sacca said that with technical people, it's one thing to look at their resumes and another to see how they are viewed among their peers. "And it was amazing how many incredibly well regarded hackers that I follow on Twitter rejoiced and celebrated [when Reed was hired]," Sacca said. "Lots of guys who know how to spit out code, they really bought that." By the time Sacca brought his Silicon Valley contingent out to Chicago, he called the technical team "top notch." After all, we're talking about a group of people who had Eric Schmidt sitting in with them on Election Day. You had to be good. The tech world was watching. Terry Howerton, the head of the Illinois Technology Association and a frank observer of Chicago's tech scene, had only glowing things to say about Reed. "Harper Reed? I think he's wicked smart," Howerton said. "He knows how to pull people together. I think that was probably what attracted the rest of the people there. Harper is responsible for a huge percentage of the people who went over there." Reed's own team found their coworkers particularly impressive. One testament to that is several startups might spin out of the connections people made at the OFA headquarters, such as Optimizely, a tool for website A/B testing, which spun out of Obama's 2008 bid. (Sacca's actually an investor in that one, too.)

"A CTO role is a weird thing," said Carol Davidsen, who left Microsoft to become the product manager for Narwhal. "The primary responsibility is getting good engineers. And there really was no one else like him that could have assembled these people that quickly and get them to take a pay cut and move to Chicago." And yet, the very things that make Reed an interesting and beloved person are the same things that make him an unlikely pick to become the chief technology officer of the reelection campaign of the president of the United States. Political people wear khakis. They only own long-sleeve dress shirts. Their old photos on Facebook show them canvassing for local politicians and winning cross-country meets. I asked Michael Slaby, Obama's 2008 chief technology officer and the guy who hired Harper Reed this time around, if it wasn't risky to hire this wild guy into a presidential campaign. "It's funny to hear you call it risky, it seems obvious to me," Slaby said. "It seems crazy to hire someone like me as CTO when you could have someone like Harper as CTO." The Nerds Are Inside the Building The strange truth is that campaigns have long been low-technologist, if not low-technology, affairs. Think of them as a weird kind of niche start-up and you can see why. You have very little time, maybe a year, really. You can't afford to pay very much. The job security, by design, is nonexistent. And even though you need to build a massive "customer" base and develop the infrastructure to get money and votes from them, no one gets to exit and make a bunch of money. So, campaign tech has been dominated by people who care about the politics of the thing, not the technology of the thing. The websites might have looked like solid consumer Web applications, but they were not under the hood. For all the hoopla surrounding the digital savvy of President Obama's 2008 campaign, and as much as everyone I spoke with loved it, it was not as heavily digital or technological as it is now remembered. "Facebook was about one-tenth of the size that it is now. Twitter was a nothing burger for the campaign. It wasn't a core or even peripheral part of our strategy," said Teddy Goff, digital director of Obama for America and a veteran of both campaigns. Think about the killer tool of that campaign, my.barackobama.com; It borrowed the "my" from MySpace. Sure, the '08 campaign had Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes, but Hughes was the spokesman for the company, not its technical guy. The '08 campaigners, Slaby told me, had been "opportunistic users of technology" who "brute forced and bailing wired" different pieces of software together. Things worked (most of the time), but everyone, Slaby especially, knew that they needed a more stable platform for 2012. Campaigns, however, even Howard Dean's famous 2004 Internet-enabled run at the Democratic nomination, did not hire a bunch of technologists. Though they hired a couple, like Clay Johnson, they bought technology from outside consultants. For 2012, Slaby wanted to change all that. He wanted dozens of engineers inhouse, and he got them. "The real innovation in 2012 is that we had world-class technologists inside a campaign," Slaby told me. "The traditional technology stuff inside campaigns had not been at the same level." And yet the technologists, no matter how good they were, brought a different worldview, set of personalities, and expectations. Campaigns are not just another Fortune 500 company or top 50 website. They have their own culture and demands, strange rigors and schedules. The deadlines are hard and the pressure would be enough to press the T-shirt of even the most battle-tested start-up veteran.

To really understand what happened behind the scenes at the Obama campaign, you need to know a little bit about its organizational structure. Tech was Harper Reed's domain. "Digital" was Joe Rospars's kingdom; his team was composed of the people who sent you all those e-mails, designed some of the consumer-facing pieces of BarackObama.com, and ran the campaigns' most-excellent accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, video, and the like. Analytics was run by Dan Wagner, and those guys were responsible for coming up with ways of finding and targeting voters they could persuade or turn out. Jeremy Bird ran Field, the on-theground operations of organizing voters at the community level that many consider Obama's secret sauce . The tech for the campaign was supposed to help the Field, Analytics, and Digital teams do their jobs better. Tech, in a campaign or at least this campaign or perhaps any successful campaign, has to play a supporting role. The goal was not to build a product. The goal was to reelect the president. As Reed put it, if the campaign were Moneyball, he wouldn't be Billy Beane, he'd be "Google Boy." There's one other interesting component to the campaign's structure. And that's the presence of two big tech vendors interfacing with the various teams--Blue State Digital and NGP Van. The most obvious is the firm that Rospars, Jascha Franklin-Hodge, and Clay Johnson cofounded, Blue State Digital. They're the preeminent progressive digital agency, and a decent chunk--maybe 30 percent--of their business comes from providing technology to campaigns. Of course, BSD's biggest client was the Obama campaign and has been for some time. BSD and Obama for America were and are so deeply enmeshed, it would be difficult to say where one ended and the other began. After all, both Goff and Rospars, the company's principals, were paid staffers of the Obama campaign. And yet between 2008 and 2012, BSD was purchased by WPP, one of the largest ad agencies in the world. What had been an obviously progressive organization was now owned by a huge conglomerate and had clients that weren't other Democratic politicians. One other thing to know about Rospars, specifically: "He's the Karl Rove of the Internet," someone who knows him very well told me. What Rove was to direct mail--the undisputed king of the medium--Rospars is to e-mail. He and Goff are the brains behind Obama's unprecedented online fundraising efforts. They know what they were doing and had proven that time and again. The complex relationship between BSD and the Obama campaign adds another dimension to the introduction of an inside team of technologists. If all campaigns started bringing their technology in house, perhaps BSD's tech business would begin to seem less attractive, particularly if many of the tools that such an inside team created were developed as open source products. So, perhaps the tech team was bound to butt heads with Rospars's digital squad. Slaby would note, too, that the organizational styles of the two operations were very different. "Campaigns aren't traditionally that collaborative," he said. "Departments tend to be freestanding. They are organized kind of like disaster response--siloed and super hierarchical so that things can move very quickly." Looking at it all from the outside, both the digital and tech teams had really good, mission-oriented reasons for wanting their way to carry the day. The tech team could say, "Hey, we've done this kind of tech before at larger scale and with more stability than you've ever had. Let us do this." And the digital team could say, "Yeah, well, we elected the president and we know how to win, regardless of the technology stack. Just make what we ask for." The way that the conflict played out was over things like the user experience on the website. Jason Kunesh was the director of UX for the tech team. He had many years of consulting under his belt for big and small companies like Microsoft and LeapFrog. He, too, from an industry perspective knew what he was doing. So, he ran some user interrupt tests on the website to determine how people were

experiencing www.barackobama.com. What he found was that the website wasn't even trying to make a go at persuading voters. Rather, everyone got funneled into the fundraising "trap." When he raised that issue with Goff and Rospars, he got a response that I imagine was something like, "Duh. Now STFU," but perhaps in more words. And from the Goff/Rospars perspective, think about it: the system they'd developed could raise $3 million *from a single email.* The sorts of moves they had learned how to make had made a difference of tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. Why was this Kunesh guy coming around trying to tell them how to run a campaign? From Kunesh's perspective, though, there was no reason to think that you had to run this campaign the same as you did the last one. The outsider status that the team both adopted and had applied to them gave them the right to question previous practices. Tech sometimes had difficulty building what the Field team, a hallowed group within the campaign's world, wanted. Most of that related to the way that they launched Dashboard, the online outreach tool. If you look at Dashboard at the end of the campaign, you see a beautifully polished product that let you volunteer any way you wanted. It's secure and intuitive and had tremendously good uptime as the campaign drew to a close. But that wasn't how the first version of Dashboard looked. The tech team's plan was to roll out version 1 with a limited feature set, iterate, roll out version 2, iterate, and so on and so forth until the software was complete and bulletproof. Per Kunesh's telling, the Field people were used to software that looked complete but that was unreliable under the hood. It looked as if you could the things you needed to do, but the software would keep falling down and getting patched, falling down and getting patched, all the way through a campaign. The tech team did not want that. They might be slower, but they were going to build solid products. Reed's team began to trickle into Chicago beginning in May 2011. They promised, over-optimistically, that they would release a version of Dashboard just a few months after the team arrived. The first version was not impressive. "Aug. 29, 2011, my birthday, we were supposed to have a prototype out of Dashboard, that was going to be the public launch," Kunesh told me. "It was freaking horrible, you couldn't show it to anyone. But I'd only been there 13 weeks and most of the team had been there half that time." As the tech team struggled to translate what people wanted into usable software, trust in the tech team-already shaky--kept eroding. By Februrary 2012, Kunesh started to get word that people on both the digital and field teams had agitated to pull the plug on Dashboard and replace the tech team with somebody, anybody, else. "A lot of the software is kind of late. It's looking ugly and I go out on this field call," Kunesh remembered. "And people are like, 'Man, we should fire your bosses man.... We gotta get the guys from the DNC. They don't know what the hell you're doing.' I'm sitting there going, 'I'm gonna get another margarita.' " While the responsibility for their early struggles certainly falls to the tech team, there were mitigating factors. For one, no one had ever done what they were attempting to do. Narwhal had to connect to a bunch of different vendors' software, some of which turned out to be surprisingly arcane and difficult. Not only that, but there were differences in the way field offices in some states did things and how campaign HQ thought they did things. Tech wasted time building things that it turned out people didn't need or want.

"In the movie version of the campaign, there's probably a meeting where I'm about to get fired and I throw myself on the table," Slaby told me. But in reality, what actually happened was Obama campaign chief Jim Messina would come by Slaby's desk and tell him, "Dude, this has to work." And Slaby would respond, "I know. It will," and then go back to work. In fact, some shake-ups were necessary. Reed and Slaby sent some product managers packing and brought in more traditional ones like former Microsoft PM Carol Davidsen. "You very much have to understand the campaign's hiring strategy: 'We'll hire these product managers who have campaign experience, then hire engineers who have technical experience--and these two worlds will magically come together.' That failed," Davidsen said. "Those two groups of people couldn't talk to each other." Then, in the late spring, all the products that the tech team had been promising started to show up. Dashboard got solid. You didn't have to log in a bunch of times if you wanted to do different things on the website. Other smaller products rolled out. "The stuff we told you about for a year is actually happening," Kunesh recalled telling the field team. "You're going to have one log-in and have all these tools, and it's all just gonna work." Perhaps most important, Narwhal really got on track, thanks no doubt to Davidsen's efforts as well as Josh Thayer's, the lead engineer who arrived in April. What Narwhal fixed was a problem that's long plagued campaigns. You have all this data coming in from all these places -- the voter file, various field offices, the analytics people, the website, mobile stuff. In 2008, and all previous races, the numbers changed once a day. It wasn't real-time. And the people looking to hit their numbers in various ways out in the field offices-number of volunteers and dollars raised and voters persuaded--were used to seeing that update happen like that. But from an infrastructure level, how much better would it be if you could sync that data in real time across the entire campaign? That's what Narwhal was supposed to do. Davidsen, in true product-manager form, broke down precisely how it all worked. First, she said, Narwhal wasn't really one thing, but several. Narwhal was just an initially helpful brand for the bundle of software. In reality, it had three components. "One is vendor integration: BSD, NGP, VAN [the latter two companies merged in 2010]. Just getting all of that data into the system and getting it in real time as soon as it goes in one system to another," she said. "The second part is an API portion. You don't want a million consumers getting data via SQL." The API allowed people to access parts of the data without letting them get at the SQL database on the backend. It provided a safe way for Dashboard, the Call Tool (which helped people make calls), and the Twitter Blaster to pull data. And the last part was the presentation of the data that was in the system. While the dream had been for all applications to run through Narwhal in real time, it turned out that couldn't work. So, they split things into real-time applications like the Call Tool or things on the web. And then they provided a separate way for the Analytics people, who had very specific needs, to get the data in a different form. Then, whatever they came up with was fed back into Narwhal. By the end, Davidsen thought all the teams' relationships had improved, even before Obama's big win. She credited a weekly Wednesday drinking and hanging-out session that brought together all the various people working on the campaign's technology. By the very end, some front-end designers who were technically on the digital team had embedded with the tech squad to get work done faster. Tech might not have been fully integrated, but it was fully operational. High fives were in the air.

Slaby, with typical pragmatism, put it like this. "Our supporters don't give a shit about our org chart. They just want to have a meaningful experience. We promise them they can play a meaningful role in politics and they don't care about the departments in the campaign. So we have to do the work on our side to look integrated and have our shit together," he said. "That took some time. You have to develop new trust with people. It's just change management. It's not complicated; it's just hard." What They Actually Built Of course, the tech didn't exist for its own sake. It was meant to be used by the organizers in the field and the analysts in the lab. Let's just run through some of the things that actually got accomplished by the tech, digital, and analytics teams beyond of Narwhal and Dashboard. They created the most sophisticated e-mail fundraising program ever. The digital team, under Rospars leadership, took their data-driven strategy to a new level. Any time you received an e-mail from the Obama campaign, it had been tested on 18 smaller groups and the response rates had been gauged. The campaign thought all the letters had a good chance of succeeding, but the worst-performing letters did only 15 to 20 percent of what the best-performing e-mails could deliver. So, if a good performer could do $2.5 million, a poor performer might only net $500,000. The genius of the campaign was that it learned to stop sending poor performers. Obama became the first presidential candidate to appear on Reddit, the massive popular social networking site. And yes, he really did type in his own answers with Goff at his side. One fascinating outcome of the AMA is that 30,000 Redditors registered to vote after president dropped in a link to the Obama voter registration page. Oh, and the campaign also officially has the most tweeted tweet and the most popular Facebook post. Not bad. I would also note that Laura Olin, a former strategist at Blue State Digital who moved to the Obama campaign, ran the best campaign Tumblr the world will probably ever see. With Davidsen's help, the Analytics team built a tool they called The Optimizer, which allowed the campaign to buy eyeballs on television more cheaply. They took set-top box (that is to say, your cable or satellite box or DVR) data from Davidsen's old startup, Navik Networks, and correlated it with the campaign's own data. This occurred through a third party called Epsilon: the campaign sent its voter file and the television provider sent their billing file and boom, a list came back of people who had done certain things like, for example, watched the first presidential debate. Having that data allowed the campaign to buy ads that they knew would get in front of the most of their people at the last cost. They didn't have to buy the traditional stuff like the local news, either. Instead, they could run ads targeted to specific types of voters during reruns or off-peak hours. According to CMAG/Kantar, the Obama's campaign's cost per ad was lower ($594) than the Romney campaign ($666) or any other major buyer in the campaign cycle. That difference may not sound impressive, but the Obama campaign itself aired more than 550,000 ads. And it wasn't just about cost, either. They could see that some households were only watching a couple hours of TV a day and might be willing to spend more to get in front of those harder-to-reach people. The digital and tech teams worked to build Twitter and Facebook Blasters, a project that had the code name Trgus for some reason. With Twitter, one of the company's former employees, Mark Trammell, helped build a tool that could specifically target individual users with direct messages. "We built an influence score for the people following the [Obama for America] accounts and then cross-referenced those for specific things we were trying to target, battleground states, that sort of stuff." Meanwhile, the teams also built an

opt-in Facebook outreach program that sent people messages saying, essentially, "Your friend, Dave in Ohio, hasn't voted yet. Go tell him to vote." Goff described the Facebook tool as "the most significant new addition to the voter contact arsenal that's come around in years, since the phone call." Last but certainly not least, you have the digital team's Quick Donate. It essentially brought the ease of Amazon's one-click purchases to political donations. "It's the absolute epitome of how you can make it easy for people to give money online," Goff said. "In terms of fundraising, that's as innovative as we needed to be." Storing people's payment information also let the campaign receive donations via text messages long before the Federal Elections Commission approved an official way of doing so. They could simply text people who'd opted in a simple message like, "Text back with how much money you'd like to donate." Sometimes people texted much larger dollar amounts back than the $10 increments that mobile carriers allow. It's an impressive array of accomplishments. What you can do with data and code just keeps advancing. "After the last campaign, I got introduced as the CTO of the most technically advanced campaign ever," Slaby said. "But that's true of every CTO of every campaign every time." Or, rather, it's true of one campaign CTO every time. Exit Music That next most technically advanced CTO, in 2016, will not be Harper Reed. A few days after the election, sitting with his wife at Wicker Park's Handlebar, eating fish tacos, and drinking a Daisy Cutter pale ale, Reed looks happy. He had told me earlier in the day that he'd never experienced stress until the Obama campaign, and I believe him. He regaled us with stories about his old performance troupe, Jugglers Against Homophobia, wild clubbing, and DJs. "It was this whole world of having fun and living in the moment," Reed said. "And there was a lot of doing that on the Internet." "I spent a lot of time hacking doing all this stuff, building websites, building communities, working all the time, " Reed said, "and then a lot of time drinking, partying, and hanging out. And I had to choose when to do which." We left Handlebar and made a quick pit stop at the coffee shop, Wormhole, where he first met Slaby. Reed cracks that it's like Reddit come to life. Both of them remember the meeting the same way: Slaby playing the role of square, Reed playing the role of hipster. And two minutes later, they were ready to work together. What began 18 months ago in that very spot was finally coming to an end. Reed could stop being Obama for America's CTO and return to being "Harper Reed, probably one of the coolest guys ever," as his personal Web page is titled. But of course, he and his whole team of nerds were changed by the experience. They learned what it was like to have--and work with people who had-- a higher purpose than building cool stuff. "Teddy [Goff] would tear up talking about the president. I would be like, 'Yeah, that guy's cool,' " Reed said. "It was only towards the end, the middle of 2012, when we realized the gravity of what we were doing." Part of that process was Reed, a technologist's technolgoist, learning the limits of his own power. "I remember at one point basically breaking down during the campaign because I was losing control. The success of it was out of my hands," he told me. "I felt like the people I hired were right, the resources we argued for were right. And because of a stupid mistake, or people were scared and they didn't adopt the technology or whatever, something could go awry. We could lose."

And losing, they felt more and more deeply as the campaign went on, would mean horrible things for the country. They started to worry about the next Supreme Court justices while they coded. "There is the egoism of technologists. We do it because we can create. I can handle all of the parameters going into the machine and I know what is going to come out of it," Reed said. "In this, the control we all enjoyed about technology was gone." We finished our drinks, ready for what was almost certainly going to be a long night, and headed to our first club. The last thing my recorder picked up over the bass was me saying to Harper, "I just saw someone buy Hennessy. I've never seen someone buy Hennessy." Then, all I can hear is that music. The Atlantic: When the nerds go marching in http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-the-nerds-go-marching-in/265325/ Alexis C. Madrigal November 16, 2012 The Obama campaign's technologists were tense and tired. It was game day and everything was going wrong. Josh Thayer, the lead engineer of Narwhal, had just been informed that they'd lost another one of the services powering their software. That was bad: Narwhal was the code name for the data platform that underpinned the campaign and let it track voters and volunteers. If it broke, so would everything else. They were talking with people at Amazon Web Services, but all they knew was that they had packet loss. Earlier that day, they lost their databases, their East Coast servers, and their memcache clusters. Thayer was ready to kill Nick Hatch, a DevOps engineer who was the official bearer of bad news. Another of their vendors, PalominoDB, was fixing databases, but needed to rebuild the replicas. It was going to take time, Hatch said. They didn't have time. They'd been working 14-hour days, six or seven days a week, trying to reelect the president, and now everything had been broken at just the wrong time. It was like someone had written a Murphy's Law algorithm and deployed it at scale. And that was the point. "Game day" was October 21. The election was still 17 days away, and this was a live action role playing (LARPing!) exercise that the campaign's chief technology officer, Harper Reed, was inflicting on his team. "We worked through every possible disaster situation," Reed said. "We did three actual all-day sessions of destroying everything we had built." Hatch was playing the role of dungeon master, calling out devilishly complex scenarios that were designed to test each and every piece of their system as they entered the exponential traffic-growth phase of the election. Mark Trammell, an engineer who Reed hired after he left Twitter, saw a couple game days. He said they reminded him of his time in the Navy. "You ran firefighting drills over and over and over, to make sure that you not just know what you're doing," he said, "but you're calm because you know you can handle your shit." The team had elite and, for tech, senior talent -- by which I mean that most of them were in their 30s -- from Twitter, Google, Facebook, Craigslist, Quora, and some of Chicago's own software companies such as Orbitz and Threadless, where Reed had been CTO. But even these people, maybe *especially* these people, knew enough about technology not to trust it. "I think the Republicans fucked up in the hubris department," Reed told me. "I know we had the best technology team I've ever worked with, but we didn't know if it would

work. I was incredibly confident it would work. I was betting a lot on it. We had time. We had resources. We had done what we thought would work, and it still could have broken. Something could have happened." In fact, the day after the October 21 game day, Amazon services -- on which the whole campaign's tech presence was built -- went down. "We didn't have any downtime because we had done that scenario already," Reed said. Hurricane Sandy hit on another game day, October 29, threatening the campaign's whole East Coast infrastructure. "We created a hot backup of all our applications to US-west in preparation for US-east to go down hard," Reed said. "We knew what to do," Reed maintained, no matter what the scenario was. "We had a runbook that said if this happens, you do this, this, and this. They did not do that with Orca." THE NEW CHICAGO MACHINE vs. THE GRAND OLD PARTY Orca was supposed to be the Republican answer to Obama's perceived tech advantage. In the days leading up to the election, the Romney campaign pushed its (not-so) secret weapon as the answer to the Democrats' vaunted ground game. Orca was going to allow volunteers at polling places to update the Romney camp's database of voters in real time as people cast their ballots. That would supposedly allow them to deploy resources more efficiently and wring every last vote out of Florida, Ohio, and the other battleground states. The product got its name, a Romney spokesperson told NPR PBS , because orcas are the only known predator of the one-tusked narwhal. The billing the Republicans gave the tool confused almost everyone inside the Obama campaign. Narwhal wasn't an app for a smartphone. It was the architecture of the company's sophisticated data operation. Narwhal unified what Obama for America knew about voters, canvassers, event-goers, and phone-bankers, and it did it in real time. From the descriptions of the Romney camp's software that were available then and now, Orca was not even in the same category as Narwhal. It was like touting the iPad as a Facebook killer, or comparing a GPS device to an engine. And besides, in the scheme of a campaign, a digitized strike list is cool, but it's not, like, a gamechanger. It's just a nice thing to have. So, it was with more than a hint of schadenfreude that Reed's team hear that Orca crashed early on election day. Later reports posted by rank-and-file volunteers describe chaos descending on the polling locations as only a fraction of the tens of thousands of volunteers organized for the effort were able to use it properly to turn out the vote. Of course, they couldn't snicker too loudly. Obama's campaign had created a similar app in 2008 called Houdini. As detailed in Sasha Issenberg's groundbreaking book, The Victory Lab, Houdini's rollout went great until about 9:30am Eastern on the day of the election. Then it crashed in much the same way Orca did. In 2012, Democrats had a new version, built by the vendor, NGP VAN. It was called Gordon, after the man who killed Houdini. But the 2008 failure, among other needs, drove the 2012 Obama team to bring technologists in-house. With election day bearing down on them, they knew they could not go down. And yet they had to accommodate much more strain on the systems as interest in the election picked up toward the end, as it always does. Mark Trammell, who worked for Twitter during its period of exponential growth, thought it would have been easy for the Obama team to fall into many of the pitfalls that the social network did back then. But while the problems of scaling both technology and culture quickly might have been similar, the stakes were much higher. A fail whale (cough) in the days leading up to or on November 6 would have been neither charming nor funny. In a race that at least some people thought might be very close, it could have cost the President the election.

And of course, the team's only real goal was to elect the President. "We have to elect the President. We don't need to sell our software to Oracle," Reed told his team. But the secondary impact of their success or failure would be to prove that campaigns could effectively hire and deploy top-level programming talent. If they failed, it would be evidence that this stuff might be best left to outside political technology consultants, by whom the arena had long been handled. If Reed's team succeeded, engineers might become as enshrined in the mechanics of campaigns as social-media teams already are. We now know what happened. The grand technology experiment worked. So little went wrong that Trammell and Reed even had time to cook up a little pin to celebrate. It said, "YOLO," short for "You Only Live Once," with the Obama Os. When Obama campaign chief Jim Messina signed off on hiring Reed, he told him, "Welcome to the team. Don't fuck it up." As Election Day ended and the dust settled, it was clear: Reed had not fucked it up. The campaign had turned out more volunteers and gotten more donors than in 2008. Sure, the field organization was more entrenched and experienced, but the difference stemmed in large part from better technology. The tech team's key products -- Dashboard, the Call Tool, the Facebook Blaster, the PeopleMatcher, and Narwhal -- made it simpler and easier for anyone to engage with the President's reelection effort. But it wasn't easy. Reed's team came in as outsiders to the campaign and by most accounts, remained that way. The divisions among the tech, digital, and analytics team never quite got resolved, even if the end product has salved the sore spots that developed over the stressful months. At their worst, in early 2012, the cultural differences between tech and everybody else threatened to derail the whole grand experiment. By the end, the campaign produced exactly what it should have: a hybrid of the desires of everyone on Obama's team. They raised hundreds of millions of dollars online, made unprecedented progress in voter targeting, and built everything atop the most stable technical infrastructure of any presidential campaign. To go a step further, I'd even say that this clash of cultures was a good thing: The nerds shook up an ossifying Democratic tech structure and the politicos taught the nerds a thing or two about stress, small-p politics, and the significance of elections. YOLO: MEET THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN'S CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER If you're a nerd, Harper Reed is an easy guy to like. He's brash and funny and smart. He gets you and where you came from. He, too, played with computers when they weren't cool, and learned to code because he just could not help himself. You could call out nouns, phenomena, and he'd be right there with you: BBS, warez, self-organizing systems, Rails, the quantified self, Singularity. He wrote his first programs at age seven, games that his mom typed into their Apple IIC. He, too, has a memory that all nerds share: Late at night, light from a chunky monitor illuminating his face, fingers flying across a keyboard, he figured something out. TV news segments about cybersecurity might look lifted straight from his memories, but the b-roll they shot of darkened rooms and typing hands could not convey the sense of exhilaration he felt when he built something that works. Harper Reed got the city of Chicago to create an open and real-time feed of its transit data by reverse engineering how they served bus location information. Why? Because it made his wife Hiromi's commute a little easier. Because it was fun to extract the data from the bureaucracy and make it available to anyone who wanted it. Because he is a nerd. Yet Reed has friends like the manager of the hip-hop club Empire who, when we walk into the place early on the Friday after the election, says, "Let me grab you a shot." Surprisingly, Harper Reed is a chilled vodka kind of guy. Unsurprisingly, Harper Reed read Steven Levy's Hackers as a kid. Surprisingly, the manager, who is tall

and handsome with rock-and-roll hair flowing from beneath a red beanie, returns to show Harper photographs of his kids. They've known each other for a long while. They are really growing up. As the night rolls on, and the club starts to fill up, another friend approached us: DJ Hiroki, who was spinning that night. Harper Reed knows the DJ. Of course. And Hiroki grabs us another shot. (At this point I'm thinking, "By the end of the night, either I pass out or Reed tells me something good.") Hiroki's been DJing at Empire for years, since Harper Reed was the crazy guy you can see on his public Facebook photos. In one shot from 2006, a skinny Reed sits in a bathtub with a beer in his hand, two thick band tattoos running across his chest and shoulders. He is not wearing any clothes. The caption reads, "Stop staring, it's not there i swear!" What makes Harper Reed different isn't just that the photo exists, but that he kept it public during the election. Yet if you've spent a lot of time around tech people, around Burning Man devotees, around startups, around San Francisco, around BBSs, around Reddit, Harper Reed probably makes sense to you. He's a cool hacker. He gets profiled by Mother Jones even though he couldn't talk with Tim Murphy, their reporter. He supports open source. He likes Japan. He says fuck a lot. He goes to hipster bars that serve vegan Mexican food, and where a quarter of the staff and clientele have mustaches. He may be like you, but he also juggles better than you, and is wilder than you, more fun than you, cooler than you. He's what a king of the nerds really looks like. Sure, he might grow a beard and put on a little potbelly, but he wouldn't tuck in his t-shirt. He is not that kind of nerd. Instead, he's got plugs in his ears and a shock of gloriously product-mussed hair and hipster glasses and he doesn't own a long-sleeve dress shirt, in case you were wondering. "Harper is an easy guy to underestimate because he looks funny. That might be part of his brand," said Chris Sacca, a well-known Silicon Valley venture capitalist and major Obama bundler who brought a team of more than a dozen technologists out for an Obama campaign hack day. Reed, for his part, has the kind of self-awareness that faces outward. His self-announced flaws bristle like quills. "I always look like a fucking idiot," Reed told me. "And if you look like an asshole, you have to be really good." It was a lesson he learned early out in Greeley, Colorado, where he grew up. "I had this experience where my dad hired someone to help him out because his network was messed up and he wanted me to watch. And this was at a very unfortunate time in my life where I was wearing very baggy pants and I had a Marilyn Manson shirt on and I looked like an asshole. And my father took me aside and was like, 'Why do you look like an asshole?' And I was like, 'I don't know. I don't have an answer.' But I realized I was just as good as the guys fixing it," Reed recalled. "And they didn't look like me and I didn't look like them. And if I'm going to do this, and look like an idiot, I have to step up. Like if we're all at zero, I have to be at 10 because I have this stupid mustache." And in fact, he may actually be at 10. Sacca said that with technical people, it's one thing to look at their resumes and another to see how they are viewed among their peers. "And it was amazing how many incredibly well regarded hackers that I follow on Twitter rejoiced and celebrated [when Reed was hired]," Sacca said. "Lots of guys who know how to spit out code, they really bought that." By the time Sacca brought his Silicon Valley contingent out to Chicago, he called the technical team "top notch." After all, we're talking about a group of people who had Eric Schmidt sitting in with them on Election Day. You had to be good. The tech world was watching. Terry Howerton, the head of the Illinois Technology Association and a frank observer of Chicago's tech scene, had only glowing things to say about Reed. "Harper Reed? I think he's wicked smart," Howerton said. "He

knows how to pull people together. I think that was probably what attracted the rest of the people there. Harper is responsible for a huge percentage of the people who went over there." Reed's own team found their co-workers particularly impressive. One testament to that is several startups might spin out of the connections people made at the OFA headquarters, such as Optimizely, a tool for website A/B testing, which spun out of Obama's 2008 bid. (Sacca's actually an investor in that one, too.) "A CTO role is a weird thing," said Carol Davidsen, who left Microsoft to become the product manager for Narwhal. "The primary responsibility is getting good engineers. And there really was no one else like him that could have assembled these people that quickly and get them to take a pay cut and move to Chicago." And yet, the very things that make Reed an interesting and beloved person are the same things that make him an unlikely pick to become the chief technology officer of the reelection campaign of the President of the United States. Political people wear khakis. They only own long-sleeve dress shirts. Their old photos on Facebook show them canvassing for local politicians and winning cross-country meets. I asked Michael Slaby, Obama's 2008 chief technology officer, and the guy who hired Harper Reed this time around, if it wasn't risky to hire this wild guy into a presidential campaign. "It's funny to hear you call it risky, it seems obvious to me," Slaby said. "It seems crazy to hire someone like me as CTO when you could have someone like Harper as CTO." THE NERDS ARE INSIDE THE BUILDING The strange truth is that campaigns have long been low-technologist, if not low-technology, affairs. Think of them as a weird kind of niche startup and you can see why. You have very little time, maybe a year, really. You can't afford to pay very much. The job security, by design, is nonexistent. And even though you need to build a massive "customer" base and develop the infrastructure to get money and votes from them, no one gets to exit and make a bunch of money. So, campaign tech has been dominated by people who care about the politics of the thing, not the technology of the thing. The websites might have looked like solid consumer web applications, but they were not under the hood. For all the hoopla surrounding the digital savvy of President Obama's 2008 campaign, and as much as everyone I spoke with loved it, it was not as heavily digital or technological as it is now remembered. "Facebook was about one-tenth of the size that it is now. Twitter was a nothing burger for the campaign. It wasn't a core or even peripheral part of our strategy," said Teddy Goff, Digital Director of Obama for America and a veteran of both campaigns. Think about the killer tool of that campaign, my.barackobama.com; It borrowed the my from MySpace. Sure, the '08 campaign had Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, but Hughes was the spokesperson for the company, not its technical guy. The '08 campaigners, Slaby told me, had been "opportunistic users of technology" who "brute forced and baling wired" different pieces of software together. Things worked (most of the time), but everyone, Slaby especially, knew that they needed a more stable platform for 2012. Campaigns, however, even Howard Dean's famous 2004 Internet-enabled run at the Democratic nomination, did not hire a bunch of technologists. Though they hired a couple, like Clay Johnson, they bought technology from outside consultants. For 2012, Slaby wanted to change all that. He wanted dozens of engineers inhouse, and he got them. "The real innovation in 2012 is that we had world-class technologists inside a campaign," Slaby told me. "The traditional technology stuff inside campaigns had not been at the same level." And yet the technologists, no matter how good they were, brought a different worldview, set of personalities, and expectations.

Campaigns are not just another Fortune 500 company or top-50 website. They have their own culture and demands, strange rigors and schedules. The deadlines are hard and the pressure would be enough to press the t-shirt of even the most battle-tested startup veteran. To really understand what happened behind the scenes at the Obama campaign, you need to know a little bit about its organizational structure. Tech was Harper Reed's domain. "Digital" was Joe Rospars' kingdom; his team was composed of the people who sent you all those emails, designed some of the consumer-facing pieces of BarackObama.com, and ran the campaigns' most-excellent accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, video, and the like. Analytics was run by Dan Wagner, and those guys were responsible for coming up with ways of finding and targeting voters they could persuade or turn out. Jeremy Bird ran Field, the on-theground operations of organizing voters at the community level that many consider Obama's secret sauce . The tech for the campaign was supposed to help the Field, Analytics, and Digital teams do their jobs better. Tech, in a campaign or at least this campaign or perhaps any successful campaign, has to play a supporting role. The goal was not to build a product. The goal was to reelect the President. As Reed put it, if the campaign were Moneyball, he wouldn't be Billy Beane, he'd be "Google Boy." There's one other interesting component to the campaign's structure. And that's the presence of two big tech vendors interfacing with the various teams -- Blue State Digital and NGP Van. The most obvious is the firm that Rospars, Jascha Franklin-Hodge, and Clay Johnson co-founded, Blue State Digital. They're the preeminent progressive digital agency, and a decent chunk -- maybe 30 percent -- of their business comes from providing technology to campaigns. Of course, BSD's biggest client was the Obama campaign and has been for some time. BSD and Obama for America were and are so deeply enmeshed, it would be difficult to say where one ended and the other began. After all, both Goff and Rospars, the company's principals, were paid staffers of the Obama campaign. And yet between 2008 and 2012, BSD was purchased by WPP, one of the largest ad agencies in the world. What had been an obviously progressive organization was now owned by a huge conglomerate and had clients that weren't other Democratic politicians. One other thing to know about Rospars, specifically: "He's the Karl Rove of the Internet," someone who knows him very well told me. What Rove was to direct mail -- the undisputed king of the medium -- Rospars is to email. He and Goff are the brains behind Obama's unprecedented online fundraising efforts. They know what they were doing and had proven that time and again. The complex relationship between BSD and the Obama campaign adds another dimension to the introduction of an inside team of technologists. If all campaigns started bringing their technology in house, perhaps BSD's tech business would begin to seem less attractive, particularly if many of the tools that such an inside team created were developed as open source products. So, perhaps the tech team was bound to butt heads with Rospars' digital squad. Slaby would note, too, that the organizational styles of the two operations were very different. "Campaigns aren't traditionally that collaborative," he said. "Departments tend to be freestanding. They are organized kind of like disaster response -- siloed and super hierarchical so that things can move very quickly." Looking at it all from the outside, both the digital and tech teams had really good, mission-oriented reasons for wanting their way to carry the day. The tech team could say, "Hey, we've done this kind of tech before at larger scale and with more stability than you've ever had. Let us do this." And the digital team could say, "Yeah, well, we elected the president and we know how to win, regardless of the technology stack. Just make what we ask for." The way that the conflict played out was over things like the user experience on the website. Jason Kunesh was the director of UX for the tech team. He had many years of consulting under his belt for big and small

companies like Microsoft and LeapFrog. He, too, from an industry perspective knew what he was doing. So, he ran some user interrupt tests on the website to determine how people were experiencing www.barackobama.com. What he found was that the website wasn't even trying to make a go at persuading voters. Rather, everyone got funneled into the fundraising "trap." When he raised that issue with Goff and Rospars, he got a response that I imagine was something like, "Duh. Now STFU," but perhaps in more words. And from the Goff/Rospars perspective, think about it: the system they'd developed could raise $3 million *from a single email.* The sorts of moves they had learned how to make had made a difference of tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. Why was this Kunesh guy coming around trying to tell them how to run a campaign? From Kunesh's perspective, though, there was no reason to think that you had to run this campaign the same as you did the last one. The outsider status that the team both adopted and had applied to them gave them the right to question previous practices. Tech sometimes had difficulty building what the Field team, a hallowed group within the campaign's world, wanted. Most of that related to the way that they launched Dashboard, the online outreach tool. If you look at Dashboard at the end of the campaign, you see a beautifully polished product that let you volunteer any way you wanted. It's secure and intuitive and had tremendously good uptime as the campaign drew to a close. But that wasn't how the first version of Dashboard looked. The tech team's plan was to roll out version 1 with a limited feature set, iterate, roll out version 2, iterate, and so on and so forth until the software was complete and bulletproof. Per Kunesh's telling, the Field people were used to software that looked complete but that was unreliable under the hood. It looked as if you could do the things you needed to do, but the software would keep falling down and getting patched, falling down and getting patched, all the way through a campaign. The tech team did not want that. They might be slower, but they were going to build solid products. Reed's team began to trickle into Chicago beginning in May of 2011. They promised, over-optimistically, that they'd release a version of Dashboard just a few months after the team arrived. The first version was not impressive. "August 29, 2011, my birthday, we were supposed to have a prototype out of Dashboard, that was going to be the public launch," Kunesh told me. "It was freaking horrible, you couldn't show it to anyone. But I'd only been there 13 weeks and most of the team had been there half that time." As the tech team struggled to translate what people wanted into usable software, trust in the tech team -already shaky -- kept eroding. By Februrary of 2012, Kunesh started to get word that people on both the digital and field teams had agitated to pull the plug on Dashboard and replace the tech team with somebody, anybody, else. "A lot of the software is kind of late. It's looking ugly and I go out on this Field call," Kunesh remembered. "And people are like, 'Man, we should fire your bosses man... We gotta get the guys from the DNC. They don't know what the hell you're doing.' I'm sitting there going, 'I'm gonna get another margarita.'" While the responsibility for their early struggles certainly falls to the tech team, there were mitigating factors. For one, no one had ever done what they were attempting to do. Narwhal had to connect to a bunch of different vendors' software, some of which turned out to be surprisingly arcane and difficult. Not only that, but there were differences in the way field offices in some states did things and how campaign HQ thought they did things. Tech wasted time building things that it turned out people didn't need or want.

"In the movie version of the campaign, there's probably a meeting where I'm about to get fired and I throw myself on the table," Slaby told me. But in reality, what actually happened was Obama's campaign chief Jim Messina would come by Slaby's desk and tell him, "Dude, this has to work." And Slaby would respond, "I know. It will," and then go back to work. In fact, some shakeups were necessary. Reed and Slaby sent some product managers packing and brought in more traditional ones like former Microsoft PM Carol Davidsen. "You very much have to understand the campaign's hiring strategy: 'We'll hire these product managers who have campaign experience, then hire engineers who have technical experience -- and these two worlds will magically come together.' That failed," Davidsen said. "Those two groups of people couldn't talk to each other." Then, in the late spring, all the products that the tech team had been promising started to show up. Dashboard got solid. You didn't have to log in a bunch of times if you wanted to do different things on the website. Other smaller products rolled out. "The stuff we told you about for a year is actually happening," Kunesh recalled telling the Field team. "You're going to have one login and have all these tools and it's all just gonna work." Perhaps most importantly, Narwhal really got on track, thanks no doubt to Davidsen's efforts as well as Josh Thayer's, the lead engineer who arrived in April. What Narwhal fixed was a problem that's long plagued campaigns. You have all this data coming in from all these places -- the voter file, various field offices, the analytics people, the website, mobile stuff. In 2008, and all previous races, the numbers changed once a day. It wasn't real-time. And the people looking to hit their numbers in various ways out in the field offices -number of volunteers and dollars raised and voters persuaded -- were used to seeing that update happen like that. But from an infrastructure level, how much better would it be if you could sync that data in real time across the entire campaign? That's what Narwhal was supposed to do. Davidsen, in true product-manager form, broke down precisely how it all worked. First, she said, Narwhal wasn't really one thing, but several. Narwhal was just an initially helpful brand for the bundle of software. In reality, it had three components. "One is vendor integration: BSD, NGP, VAN [the latter two companies merged in 2010]. Just getting all of that data into the system and getting it in real time as soon as it goes in one system to another," she said. "The second part is an API portion. You don't want a million consumers getting data via SQL." The API allowed people to access parts of the data without letting them get at the SQL database on the backend. It provided a safe way for Dashboard, the Call Tool (which helped people make calls), and the Twitter Blaster to pull data. And the last part was the presentation of the data that was in the system. While the dream had been for all applications to run through Narwhal in real time, it turned out that couldn't work. So, they split things into real-time applications like the Call Tool or things on the web. And then they provided a separate way for the Analytics people, who had very specific needs, to get the data in a different form. Then, whatever they came up with was fed back into Narwhal. By the end, Davidsen thought all the teams' relationships had improved, even before Obama's big win. She credited a weekly Wednesday drinking and hanging out session that brought together all the various people working on the campaign's technology. By the very end, some front-end designers who were technically on the digital team had embedded with the tech squad to get work done faster. Tech might not have been fully integrated, but it was fully operational. High fives were in the air. Slaby, with typical pragmatism, put it like this. "Our supporters don't give a shit about our org chart. They just want to have a meaningful experience. We promise them they can play a meaningful role in politics and they don't care about the departments in the campaign. So we have to do the work on our side to look

integrated and have our shit together," he said. "That took some time. You have to develop new trust with people. It's just change management. It's not complicated; it's just hard." WHAT THEY ACTUALLY BUILT Of course, the tech didn't exist for its own sake. It was meant to be used by the organizers in the field and the analysts in the lab. Let's just run through some of the things that actually got accomplished by the tech, digital, and analytics teams beyond of Narwhal and Dashboard. They created the most sophisticated email fundraising program ever. The digital team, under Rospars leadership, took their data-driven strategy to a new level. Any time you received an email from the Obama campaign, it had been tested on 18 smaller groups and the response rates had been gauged. The campaign thought all the letters had a good chance of succeeding, but the worst-performing letters did only 15 to 20 percent of what the best-performing emails could deliver. So, if a good performer could do $2.5 million, a poor performer might only net $500,000. The genius of the campaign was that it learned to stop sending poor performers. Obama became the first presidential candidate to appear on Reddit, the massive popular social networking site. And yes, he really did type in his own answers with Goff at his side. One fascinating outcome of the AMA is that 30,000 Redditors registered to vote after President dropped in a link to the Obama voter registration page. Oh, and the campaign also officially has the most tweeted tweet and the most popular Facebook post. Not bad. I would also note that Laura Olin, a former strategist at Blue State Digital who moved to the Obama campaign, ran the best campaign Tumblr the world will probably ever see. With Davidsen's help, the Analytics team built a tool they called The Optimizer, which allowed the campaign to buy eyeballs on television more cheaply. They took set-top box (that is to say, your cable or satellite box or DVR) data from Davidsen's old startup, Navik Networks, and correlated it with the campaign's own data. This occurred through a third party called Epsilon: the campaign sent its voter file and the television provider sent their billing file and boom, a list came back of people who had done certain things like, for example, watched the first presidential debate. Having that data allowed the campaign to buy ads that they knew would get in front of the most of their people at the least cost. They didn't have to buy the traditional stuff like the local news, either. Instead, they could run ads targeted to specific types of voters during reruns or off-peak hours. According to CMAG/Kantar, the Obama's campaign's cost per ad was lower ($594) than the Romney campaign ($666) or any other major buyer in the campaign cycle. That difference may not sound impressive, but the Obama campaign itself aired more than 550 thousand ads. And it wasn't just about cost, either. They could see that some households were only watching a couple hours of TV a day and might be willing to spend more to get in front of those harder-to-reach people. Goff described the Facebook tool as "the most significant new addition to the voter contact arsenal that's come around in years, since the phone call." The digital, tech, and analytics teams worked to build Twitter and Facebook Blasters. They ran on a service that generated microtargeting data that was built by Will St. Clair. It was code named Trgus Taargs for some reason. With Twitter, one of the company's former employees, Mark Trammell, helped build a tool that could specifically send individual users direct messages. "We built an influence score for the people following the [Obama for America] accounts and then cross-referenced those for specific things we were trying to target, battleground states, that sort of stuff." Meanwhile, the teams also built an opt-in Facebook outreach program that sent people messages saying, essentially, "Your friend, Dave in Ohio, hasn't voted yet.

Go tell him to vote." Goff described the Facebook tool as "the most significant new addition to the voter contact arsenal that's come around in years, since the phone call." Last but certainly not least, you have the digital team's Quick Donate. It essentially brought the ease of Amazon's one-click purchases to political donations. "It's the absolute epitome of how you can make it easy for people to give money online," Goff said. "In terms of fundraising, that's as innovative as we needed to be." Storing people's payment information also let the campaign receive donations via text messages long before the Federal Elections Commission approved an official way of doing so. They could simply text people who'd opted in a simple message like, "Text back with how much money you'd like to donate." Sometimes people texted much larger dollar amounts back than the $10 increments that mobile carriers allow. It's an impressive array of accomplishments. What you can do with data and code just keeps advancing. "After the last campaign, I got introduced as the CTO of the most technically advanced campaign ever," Slaby said. "But that's true of every CTO of every campaign every time." Or, rather, it's true of one campaign CTO every time. EXIT MUSIC That next most technically advanced CTO, in 2016, will not be Harper Reed. A few days after the election, sitting with his wife at Wicker Park's Handlebar, eating fish tacos, and drinking a Daisy Cutter pale ale, Reed looks happy. He'd told me earlier in the day that he'd never experienced stress until the Obama campaign, and I believe him. He regaled us with stories about his old performance troupe, Jugglers Against Homophobia, wild clubbing and DJs. "It was this whole world of having fun and living in the moment," Reed said. "And there was a lot of doing that on the Internet." "I spent a lot of time hacking doing all this stuff, building websites, building communities, working all the time, " Reed said, "and then a lot of time drinking, partying, and hanging out. And I had to choose when to do which." We left Handlebar and made a quick pitstop at the coffee shop, Wormhole, where he first met Slaby. Reed cracks that it's like Reddit come to life. Both of them remember the meeting the same way: Slaby playing the role of square, Reed playing the role of hipster. And two minutes later, they were ready to work together. What began 18 months ago in that very spot was finally coming to an end. Reed could stop being Obama for America's CTO and return to being "Harper Reed, probably one of the coolest guys ever," as his personal webpage is titled. But of course, he and his whole team of nerds were changed by the experience. They learned what it was like to have -- and work with people who had -- a higher purpose than building cool stuff. "Teddy [Goff] would tear up talking about the President. I would be like, 'Yeah, that guy's cool,'" Reed said. "It was only towards the end, the middle of 2012, when we realized the gravity of what we were doing." Part of that process was Reed, a technologist's technologist, learning the limits of his own power. "I remember at one point basically breaking down during the campaign because I was losing control. The success of it was out of my hands," he told me. "I felt like the people I hired were right, the resources we argued for were right. And because of a stupid mistake, or people were scared and they didn't adopt the technology or whatever, something could go awry. We could lose." And losing, they felt more and more deeply as the campaign went on, would mean horrible things for the country. They started to worry about the next Supreme Court Justices while they coded.

"There is the egoism of technologists. We do it because we can create. I can handle all of the parameters going into the machine and I know what is going to come out of it," Reed said. "In this, the control we all enjoyed about technology was gone." We finished our drinks, ready for what was almost certainly going to be a long night, and headed to our first club. The last thing my recorder picked up over the bass was me saying to Harper, "I just saw someone buy Hennessy. I've never seen someone buy Hennessy." Then, all I can hear is that music. TPM: Facebooks election 2012 roundup: big bird, binders full of women won big http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/11/facebooks-election-2012-roundup-big-bird-binders-full-ofwomen-won-big.php Carl Franzen November 16, 2012 Facebook was more than just a place to share political opinions during the 2012 U.S. general election, with the company itself releasing a suite of tools and apps to help voters find their polling place, connect with each other, and keep track in real time of who said they voted and where around the country. Facebook kept track of self-declared users who voted through posts and through an Im Voting app it worked on with CNN. One academic study even found Facebook may have responsible for boosting turnout among young voters. But now Facebook itself is revealing some of its own internal measures of just how many people and what types used Facebook on Election Day, and for what purposes. On Friday, Facebook posted a roundup of results from its 2012 Election-themed user activity on its Data Science page. Heres some of the more interesting findings about Facebook users and the 2012 Election: Women shared that they were voting more than men However, as Facebook Data Science researcher Eytan Bakshy wrote in the post Friday, women are disproportionately more likely to share in general on Facebook. Compared to comments, likes and status updates, voting has the same amount of gender imbalance as we see in other forms of communication. This is illustrated in the following graph Facebook posted: Self-declared Facebook voters were also more Democratic and more likely to support Obama Facebook released the following graph of voter turnout of its U.S. members during the election according to party affiliation: The highest turnout was for Obama supporters at 18.2 percent, followed closely by self-identified Democrats at 18 percent. The turnout among conservatives was just over 12 percent, and the turnout among those identified as very conservative was just over 14 percent. Younger voters dominated The following two graphs show the breakdown of age and 1) overall voter participation on Facebook by political identification 2) voter participation on mobile devices. Clearly, younger voters were the most likely to share that they voted on Facebook, which might be expected. But whats surprising is how large the age window was, with top activity of those self-identified voters

basically plateauing between ages 18 and 44 for those who said they voted across the site. Meanwhile, the majority of people age 22-38 shared their vote on a mobile device, as Bakshy put it. The two Presidential candidates werent even at the top of Facebooks ticket Surprisingly, when it came to how well Likes predicted voter turnout on Facebook, it was First Lady Michelle Obama and Mitt Romneys VP candidate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) who predicted the most votes. Also, because this is Facebook election-themed memes were a large predictor of voter turnout, with Big Bird and Binders Full of Women leading the pack: TPM has reached out to Facebook for further comment on its Election 2012 participation and will update when we receive a response. Technology Review: How Facebook Boosted Obama's Vote Tally http://www.technologyreview.com/view/507606/how-facebook-boosted-obamas-vote-tally/ By Tom Simonite November 16, 2012 Facebook just revealed some interesting figures about who responded to its reminder to vote this recent presidential election day. Combined with evidence that a similar widget sent an extra 340,000 voters to the polls in 2010, the new figures suggest that Facebooks decision to implement the feature directly boosted president Obamas vote tally. The reminder offered up a button labeled Im a voter, and showed the names and faces of friends that had already clicked it. In a new blog post, Facebook data scientist Eytan Bakshy, tells us about the people most likely to have clicked that button on November 6, and it seems clear that more of them would have voted for Barack Obama than Mitt Romney. Although many more will have seen the Im a voter button, nine million people clicked it. Twice as many women as men did so, while exit polls tell us that overall Obama led with female voters. Meanwhile, almost 20 percent of people who stated their political affiliation as Barack Obama, Democratic or Very liberal clicked Facebooks Im a voter button, while only about 15 percent of those identifying as Republican or Independent did so. Many of those people would have voted anyway. However, we know that the I voted reminder that shows a person which of their friends also clicked can turn out votes that would otherwise not be cast. Research published in the prestigious journal Science in September told us that in 2010 a version of the voting reminder similar to that used this month drove an additional 340,000 voters to polls nationwide. James Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, led the study, which involved matching public voter records with Facebooks data (see How Facebook Drove Voters to the Polls). So, if the same effect was at work this time around, Facebooks get out the vote reminder would clearly have boosted the number of votes cast for Obama. Thats something my colleague David Talbot suggested could happen in advance of the election (see Facebooks Plans Could Affect the Election). Gawker: How The Obama Campaign's Data-Miners Knew What You Watched On TV http://gawker.com/5961202/how-the-obama-campaigns-data+miners-knew-what-you-were-watching-on-tv By Adrian Chen November 16, 2012

Since the campaign is done, the Obama campaign's massive, supersecret tech operation has finally been opened up for the world to marvel at. Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic has written a fascinating profile of Obama's tech team. Buried in it is the fairly unsettling fact that the Obama campaign's data-mining operation could use their databases to determine what you were watching on TV. The Obama campaign's sophisticated technology platform, "Narwhal," is being credited with giving Obama a significant edge over Romney, whose much-touted "Orca" system pooped out on election day, when it was most needed. One key part of Obama's Narwhal was an analytics department five times larger than the 2008 team, which gathered an unprecedented amount of data on potential voters, for use in determining campaign strategy. They had so much data, in fact, they even knew what people were watching on TVand not in a ratings sense, but in the sense of whether you, individually, had tuned into a certain program: Madrigal explains: With [project manager Carol Davidsen's] help the Analytics team built a tool they called The Optimizer, which allowed the campaign to buy eyeballs on television more cheaply. They took set-top box (that is to say, your cable or satellite box or DVR) data from Davidsen's old startup, Navik Networks, and correlated it with the campaign's own data. This occurred through a third party called Epsilon: the campaign sent its voter file and the television provider sent their billing file and boom, a list came back of people who had done certain things like, for example, watched the first presidential debate. So the Obama campaign's data-mining team could get a big list of the names of people who watched certain things on TV. I have a lot of questions about this. Is this a common marketing tactic? Why would a billing file show what people watched on TV, anyway? And can we use this data to round up everyone obsessed with Homeland and put them on an island until the series is done, so I won't have to hear about it any more? MotherJones: Under the Hood of Team Obama's Tech Operation http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/11/inside-obama-campaign-tech-operation By Tim Murphy November 15, 2012 Mitt Romney's top strategists don't have to look very far to see where things went terribly wrong. All they have to do is check the bottom line. According to Kantar Media's post-election tally of 2012 spending, the Romney campaign spent an average of $666 per television spot$72 more than its Democratic rival. Post-election, the conservative base has focused much of its ire on Team Romney's failed voter-turnout tool (code name: Project ORCA). But the gap in per-ad spending is perhaps more illustrative of the technological chasm between the rival campaignsa gap that Team Obama leveraged into an edge in fundraising, messaging, and, ultimately, the election. It was no accident. Over the last four years, the Obama campaign has sought to turn the art of campaigning into something closer to a science. A major drawback with TV advertisingfor politicos and businesses alikehas always been in the pricing. "It's not like the stock market where you can just plug it in and you know the rate," says Carol Davidsen, director of integration and media targeting for the Obama campaign. Local stations can substantially change the price of a time slot even after it has been reserved. So the campaign looked for a way, as best it could, to predict the future. The solution was a program called Optimizer: A team of software engineers at Obama HQ in Chicago headquarters developed a system that collected reams of data on the pricing of TV ads. An analytics team, operating out of a side room half-jokingly dubbed "The Cave," then sifted through the data in search of efficiencies.

"Okay, here are the households that watch Spongebob; what else are they watching?" The results prompted the Obama campaign to seek bargains outside of the usual local newscasts. And thanks to data it had already collected on likely voters, the geeks had a pretty good idea of where to look. For instance, the analytics team discovered that a large number of registered voters who had avoided watching the debates weren't apathetic after all; they just had young kids and were too busy to tune in. "So then it's like, 'Okay, here are the households that watch Spongebob; what else are they watching?'" Davidsen says. The team used the same approach for voters tagged as non-news consumers or who watched fewer than two hours of television per day. "It was kind of like a secret weapon," Davidsen adds. An armory might be the better analogy: For all the talk of debates and strategy, of Bain and the 47 percent, President Obama was reelected last Tuesday in no small part thanks to the work of an unprecedented political tech operation. Its edge allowed Chicago to build the most prolific online fundraising machine ever and spend the cash it raised more effectively. (The campaign hasn't released its final online fundraising tally, but staffers expect that it will exceed the $500 million brought in four years ago.) A simple hack, Quick Donate netted the campaign an extra $60 million, campaign staffers estimate. Early in the process, as the Republican primaries were in their last throes, the Obama campaign's digital division worked with the Democratic firm Blue State Digital to develop a fundraising shortcut called Quick Donate. A simple hack, it gave donors the option of saving their credit card information on the donation website. If people consented, subsequent fundraising pitchesthere were dozens each weekwould include a one-click donation button for various small-dollar amounts. (Normally, supporters would have to be routed through the website to provide their credit information again.) If the pre-approved donors also signed up for SMS alerts, giving became as easy as sending a text. All told, Quick Donate netted the campaign about $60 million more than it would have raised with email blasts alone. Using digital analytics, Team Obama was likewise able to squeeze every last cent out of supporters in ways unimaginable only four years ago. In 2008, with the help of a Google alum named Dan Siroker, the campaign had begun using A/B testingsending variations of an email or a web page to different groups of people to measure the relative effectiveness of each. In the latest election cycle, that ethos extended to pretty much everything the campaign did, from fundraising emails (sent out in 26 varieties and then analyzed for patterns) to the online donation landing page. By turning its donation process into four steps instead of a single long form, the campaign boosted fundraising from its donations page by 15 percent. Now if an organizer tapped his tablet in Cuyahoga, it had a ripple effect in Chicago. Over the last decade, as campaigns acquired more and more dataeverything from voters' shopping habits to their caucus attendance recordthey ran into a bit of a Babel problem. Their disparate databases were often incompatible, so that an online phone banker, for example, might waste resources by calling a person who'd already told in-person canvassers that he or she had voted early. The solution was a project called Narwhal, managed by Davidsen. Narwhal integrated all of the various data setsconsumer data, voting history, party file, and online profileso that they could be updated and accessed in real-time. Now if an organizer tapped his tablet in Cuyahoga, it had a ripple effect in Chicago. The campaign also got better at using its tools to understand and respond what was going on in the field. "The most important part of the data story that doesn't get told is a phrase that [Team Obama CTO Harper Reed] uses a lot and we sort of stole from [tech entrepreneur] Tim O'Reilly," says Michael Slaby, the campaign's director of integration and innovation. "It's called 'microlistening.'

Last June, just a few weeks after he had signed on with the campaign following a long stint at the T-shirt retailer Threadless, Reed traveled to Foo Camp, an annual, invitation-only technology conference held in the San Francisco Bay Area. As Reed expounded on the problems the campaign was encountering as it sought to get its mojo back, O'Reilly approached with some advice: "I think the campaign needs to get over targeting," Reed recalls him saying. "And they need to start thinking about listening." One 261-word email plea, titled "I will be outspent," netted Team Obama $2.4 million in a little more than a day. Reed took it to heart. When the campaign rolled out Dashboarda one-stop site for phone-banking, eventplanning, and networkingit transformed how volunteers and staff interacted. The new platform allowed OFA to collect feedback from the ground on an enormous scale, and respond accordingly. In short, it made the flow of information bidirectional. "What it did was it listened, and it trickled up information," Reed told me. "So like, if you were a volunteer and you knocked on a bunch of doors and you had a particularly bad day, you could say, 'I'm in a very red area, I'm having a particularly bad day specifically on health care.' So that trickles up. And so, at HQ, you're able to say, 'We need to send this person more information, particularly about health care, to arm them, so it can be less depressing.'" As Slaby explains, Dashboard also increased the "stickiness" of the campaign's contacts with supporters. If someone used the platform to, say, join a Veterans for Obama group or sign up to help at their local precinct, they'd hear back from a real person within three days. "After 72 hours, the likelihood that someone's going to engage drops precipitously," Slaby says. It's not like there weren't some scary times. After the GOP primaries wound down in May and June, Team Obama's online registration drive was signing up just a few dozen new voters per day and digital fundraising was flounderinga large part of the reason why the campaign was considering dramatically scaling down its final fundraising marks. But their fortunes reversed on June 26. That's the day the campaign blasted out a fundraising email bearing the president's name and an ominous subject line: "I will be outspent." The brief, 261-word pitch brought in $2.4 million in a little more than a daymore than double what the campaign had ever raised in a single email push. They never looked back. TIME: Exclusive: Obamas 2012 digital fundraising outperformed 2008 http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/15/exclusive-obamas-2012-digital-fundraising-outperformed-2008/ Michael Scherer November 15, 2012 Nearly a year ago, Barack Obamas campaign manager Jim Messina took to YouTube with an expletive-laden post-holiday message for supporters. People have speculated that this is a billion dollar campaign, Messina said. Thats bull-. And he meant it, at the time. But when the final numbers are counted, Obamas aides now expect more than $1 billion dollars to have been raised by the 2012 campaign and its affiliated party committees, breaking the 10-figure milestone for the first time in history. The reason is simple: the campaign brought in more small-dollar fundraising through email, social media, mobile and its website during the final months of the race than initially projected. In total, according to new campaign calculations acquired exclusively by TIME, the Obama team raised about $690 million digitally in 2012, up from about $500 million in 2008, according to a senior campaign adviser.

That number includes all contributions that were given electronically, including some donations that were generated by high-dollar fundraisers but logged through the website. When counting only fundraising that was initially generated by digital efforts, including email, social media, mobile and the website, the 2012 campaign raised $504 million, up from $403 million in 2008. Much of that digital campaign cash came in the final months of the campaign. September 2012, for instance, was a better month than September 2008 online. And in October 2012, when there was significant voter excitement and anxiety generated by the presidential debates, digital fundraising increased on a month-over-month basis, instead of decreasing as it did in 2008. The total number of donors to the campaign also increased in 2012, the adviser said. In all, 4.4 million individuals gave to the Obama re-election bid, up from 3.95 million in 2008. This success runs counter to the conventional wisdom, which held that Obamas re-election campaign would struggle mightily to approach the enormous grassroots enthusiasm of his first presidential run. It is also a testament to the campaigns leadership, including Messina, who invested heavily in digital efforts early, and the campaigns digital team, run by Teddy Goff, Marie Ewald and Blue State Digitals Joe Rospars, who were able to fine-tune their tactics and techniques for raising money electronically. It may also suggest that American voters over the last four years have become more comfortable with the idea of giving small amounts of money to a presidential campaign online. Here are some other digital milestones that the 2012 campaign has been celebrating, according to the senior adviser who spoke with TIME: The number of likes on Facebook pages for the campaign, including everyone from the President to Michelle Obama to Joe Biden, increased from 19 million to 45 million over the course of the race. The number of Twitter followers increased from 7 million to 23 million. Partly as a result, an image of President Obama embracing his wife, which was tweeted and shared over Facebook on Election Night, became the most shared pieces of content in both social networks histories. As of today, the Facebook photo has more than 4.4 million likes, and has been shared more than 582,000 times. President Obamas interview on the social site Reddit gave the aggregator the biggest traffic spike in its history. The campaigns new social network for supporters, Dashboard, organized more than 358,000 offline events over the course of the campaign. There were 1.1 million RSVPs for those events. More than 1 million people downloaded the campaigns Facebook App, which allowed the campaign to overlay its own voter files with the friend networks of its supporters. In the final weeks of the campaign, the campaign used this information to ask its supporters to directly contact their friends who were targeted voters in key swing states via Facebook, with specific requests for everything from voting early to watching a specific persuasion video. In all, more than 600,000 supporters shared items with an estimated 5 million individual targets through this system. The exact number of people reached, however, is not known; traffic on the system was so high on Election Day that logs of voter activity were taken offline to free up server space. ARS Technica: Built to win: Deep inside Obama's campaign tech http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/built-to-win-deep-inside-obamas-campaign-tech/ Sean Gallagher November 14, 2012 The reelection of Barack Obama was won by people, not by software. But in a contest as close as last week's election, software may have given the Obama for America organization's people a tiny edgemaking them by some measures more efficient, better connected, and more engaged than the competition.

That edge was provided by the work of a group of people unique in the history of presidential politics: Team Tech, a dedicated internal team of technology professionals who operated like an Internet startup, leveraging a combination of open source software, Web services, and cloud computing power. The result was the sort of numbers any startup would consider a success. As Scott VanDenPlas, the head of the Obama technology team's DevOps group, put it in a tweet: 4Gb/s, 10k requests per second, 2,000 nodes, 3 datacenters, 180TB and 8.5 billion requests. Design, deploy, dismantle in 583 days to elect the President. #madops But the tech had not always worked so well. Four years ago, the Obama camp was in much the same position as Romney found himself in 2012, coming out of the primaries with only a short amount of time in which to pull together a national campaign. Despite having some people with tech expertise, the 2008 Obama campaign lacked an internal IT team, relying on vendors and field volunteers to pull much of the weight. "One of the biggest problems in the last campaign was that you had all these people who are out in the field who are volunteering who start building their own versions of these rogue tools to do the same thing over and over again," said Clint Ecker, senior engineer for Obama for America (and an Ars Technica alum). Every field office assembled its own patchwork of tools using spreadsheets or a hacked Web application to track operations. They communicated over Google groups or simple e-mail lists. "It made it hard to keep everyone on the same page," he added. Then there was the much-vaunted secret weapon, Project Houdinia get-out-the-vote system that was supposed to revolutionize the Election Day ground game. Each voter in each swing-state voting precinct was assigned a numeric code; when poll watchers recorded the voters arriving, the watchers were supposed to dial in the code to Houdini's automated hotline. But the load on the hotline brought it down, and the campaign had to fail over either to texting or to calling the codes back into local field offices, where the data was re-entered into a webpage manually. Houdini's database stayed up, and it still played a role in the Obama campaign's efforts on Election Day 2008. But it was clear that the system hadn't been ready for the wave of data it was supposed to handle. "2008 was the 'Jaws' moment," said Obama for America's Chief Technology Officer Harper Reed. "It was, 'Oh my God, we're going to need a bigger boat." So they began to build one. Harper Reed. To pull it off, the Obama team relied almost exclusively on Amazon's cloud computing services for computing and storage power. At its peak, the IT infrastructure for the Obama campaign took up "a significant amount of resources in AWS's Northern Virginia data center," said Ecker. "We actually had to start using beefier servers, because for a period of time we were buying up most of the available smaller Elastic Compute Cloud instance types in the East data center." "Reed wanted to wire the campaign with its own application programming interface." Atop Amazon's services, the Obama team built Narwhala set of services that acted as an interface to a single shared data store for all of the campaign's applications, making it possible to quickly develop new applications and to integrate existing ones into the campaign's system. Those apps include sophisticated analytics programs like Dreamcatcher, a tool developed to "microtarget" voters based on sentiments within text. And there's Dashboard, the "virtual field office" application that helped volunteers communicate and collaborate.

"Being able to decouple all the apps from each other [by using Narwhal] has such power," Harper Reed, the chief technology officer for the Obama campaign, told Ars. "It allowed us to scale each app individually and to share a lot of data between the apps, and it really saved us a lot of time." The resulting platform gave Obama for America tools that helped "force-multiply" volunteers, giving them organizational and communication tools that made the Obama "ground game" even more effective. When Reed was brought onboard by Obama campaign Chief Integration and Innovation Officer Michael Slaby in June 2011, the choices Reed made were informed by the 2008 campaignbut also by the mentality of Internet startups. "We knew we were going to go big," Reed said. "We needed to architect [the campaign's IT infrastructure] in such a way that it actually worked. And we also knew we were going to be resource-constrainedwhether it was money or people, we knew we weren't going to have everything we wanted." They did have the incumbent's advantage, though: time to prepare. "I don't think we would have been able to [build Narwhal] if we had to deal with the primaries," Reed said. The architecture Reed envisioned had to scale up rapidly. It needed flexibility, allowing developers with any level of experience who joined the campaign to work in and be productive with whatever language they preferred, and it had to integrate with the systems of vendors (such as Blue State Digital and NGP VAN). It needed to handle the needs of volunteers in the field and in the campaign's "Team Digital" (responsible for the campaign's Web presence, social, and other digital media presence), while also feeding the "big data" machine of Team Data (the campaign's analytics department). In other words, Reed wanted to wire the campaign with its own application programming interface (API). And, like many Internet startups, he looked to the cloud to make it scale. "I looked at a lot of architectures," Reed said. "Coming out of [previous employer] Threadless, and having watched what Amazon and other large organizations had doneand how powerful these API platforms have becomeit was obvious that the best path forward was to follow services oriented architecture (SOA) principles and build a services architecture that allowed for all of our apps to connect together and share one common data store." But to build Reed's "bigger boat" meant adopting a startup-like strategy in more ways than just architecture. He needed to build a team within the Obama campaign that behaved like an Internet startup, a dedicated staff of engineers willing to work long hours for a rapid ramp-up to the ultimate payout: reelecting the president. The team Reed went out and recruited people who already knew the territory, snapping up both local talent (such as Ecker) and people from out of town with Internet bona fidesveterans from companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and TripIt. "All these guys have had experience working in startups and experience in scaling apps from nothing to huge in really tight situations like we were in the campaign," Ecker said. "When you put down the constraints you have, it's pretty easy to figure out who you're hiring," Reed added. "You're looking for engineers who understand APIsengineers that spend a lot of time on the Internet building platforms. When you talk about SOA, they're not just going to laugh at you and say you're talking about Java."

Rather than focusing on creating something significantly new, Reed said, the team focused on taking what they already knew worked and fitting the pieces together. "We aggressively stood on the shoulders of giants like Amazon, and used technology that was built by other people," he said. "We had a pretty good culture of using not-invented-here technologies. And we weren't scared about it." In some cases, he added, it was just the oppositeif something came up as a solution and had never been used at that scale by someone else, it was "super scary" and usually avoided. The Democrats were going to play it conservative. The "glamour" of working in a campaign's office. The first recruits started rolling in soon after Reed joined, giving the team 583 days to do their work. "It really became apparent that there needed to be a centralized place for all this data to flow into from all our vendors and for the new applications," Ecker said. "We needed a standard RESTful API that any project could talk to using any programming language and any Web framework, whatever people are most comfortable in so that they can hit the ground running." We aggressively stood on the shoulders of giants and used technology that was built by other people." That meant Narwhal. Written in Python, the API side of Narwhal exposes data elements through standard HTTP requests. While it was designed to work on top of any data store, the Obama tech team relied on Amazon's MySQL-based Relational Database Service (RDS). The "snapshot" capability of RDS allowed images of databases to be dumped into Simple Storage Service (S3) instances without having to run backups. Even with the rapidly growing sets of shared data, the Obama tech team was able to stick with RDS for the entire campaignthough it required some finesse. "We definitely bumped up against some limitations with RDS but they were largely self-inflicted," Ecker said. "We were able to work around those and stretch how far we were able to take RDS. If the campaign had been longer, we would have definitely had to migrate to big EC2 boxes with MySQL on them instead." Not having to switch off RDS meant that the Obama campaign saved "a shitload of money" on hiring additional database administrators, Ecker added. Ecker says the team also tested Amazon's DynamoDB "NoSQL" database when it was introduced. While it didn't replace the SQL-based RDS service as Narwhal's data store, it was pressed into service for some of the other parts of the campaign's infrastructure. In particular, it was used in conjunction with the campaign's social networking "get-out-the-vote" efforts. The integration element of Narwhal was built largely using programs that run off Amazon's Simple Queue Service (SQS). It pulled in streams of data from NGP VAN's and Blue State Digital's applications, polling data providers, and many more, and handed them off to worker applicationswhich in turn stuffed the data into SQS queues for processing and conversion from the vendors' APIs. Another element of Narwhal that used SQS was its e-mail infrastructure for applications, using worker applications to process e-mails, storing them in S3 to pass them in bulk from one stage of handling to another. Initially, Narwhal development was shared across all the engineers. As the team grew near the beginning of 2012, however, Narwhal development was broken into two groupsan API team that developed the interfaces required for the applications being developed in-house by the campaign, and an integration team that handled connecting the data streams from vendors' applications.

The apps As the team supporting Narwhal grew, the pace of application development accelerated as well, with more applications being put in the hands of the field force. Perhaps the most visible of those applications to the people on the front lines were Dashboard and Call Tool. Written in Rails, Dashboard was launched in early 2012. "It's a little unconventional in that it never talks to a database directlyjust to Narwhal through the API," Ecker said. "We set out to build this online field office so that it would let people organize into groups and teams in local neighborhoods, and have message boards and join constituency groups." An Obama campaign video demonstrating how to use Dashboard. Enlarge / The Dashboard Web application, still live, helped automate the recruitment and outreach to wouldbe Obama campaign volunteers. Dashboard didn't replace real-world field offices; rather, it was designed to overcome the problems posed by the absence of a common tool set in the 2008 election, making it easier for volunteers to be recruited and connected with people in their area. It also handled some of the metrics of running a field organization by tracking activities such as canvassing, voter registration, and phone calls to voters. The Obama campaign couldn't mandate Dashboard's use. But the developer team evolved the program as it developed relationships with people in the field, and Dashboard use started to pick up steam. Part of what drove adoption of Dashboard was its heavy social networking element, which made it a sort of Facebook for Obama supporters. Enlarge / Call Tool offered supporters a way to join in on specific affinity-group calling programs. Call Tool was the Obama campaign's tool to drive its get-out-the-vote (GOTV) and other voter contact efforts. It allowed volunteers anywhere to join a call campaign, presenting a random person's phone number and a script with prompts to follow. Call Tool also allowed for users to enter notes about calls that could be processed by "collaborative filtering" on the back endidentifying if a number was bad, or if the person at that number spoke only Spanish, for instanceto ensure that future calls were handled properly. Both Call Tool and Dashboardas well as nearly all of the other volunteer-facing applications coded by the Obama campaign's IT teamintegrated with another application called Identity. Identity was a single-sign-on application that tracked volunteer activity across various activities and allowed for all sorts of campaign metrics, such as tracking the number of calls made with Call Tool and displaying them in Dashboard as part of group "leaderboards." The leaderboards were developed to "gamify" activities like calling, allowing for what Ecker called "friendly competition" within groups or regions. All of the data collected through various volunteer interactions and other outreach found its way into Narwhal's data store, where it could be mined for other purposes. Much of the data was streamed into Dreamcatcher and into a Vertica columnar database cluster used by the analytics team for deep dives into the data. DevOps on the campaign trail A great deal of the Obama IT team's efforts were focused on redundancyin terms of how Narwhal and the apps that used it were deployed, how the various instances of Amazon services that supported them were provisioned, and even in the development of additional code. For example, the engineering team developed its own credit card payment API to help handle donations.

"In the past, we relied wholly on vendors to take payments," Ecker said. "But this time around, we had engineering bandwidth to build backup payment bridges so that we could load balance between vendors' payment processor endpoints and ours." While the infrastructure for Narwhal and the other applications resided primarily in Amazon's Northern Virginia data center, the Obama DevOps team kept systems deployed across at least two availability zones. And when Hurricane Sandy threatened, the team prepared a contingency planabout 500 of the campaign's EC2 instances were replicated and waiting to go live in Amazon's West Coast data center. "We really took no chances, and we basically replicated our entire infrastructure over to the West Coast data center over the course of a couple of days," Ecker said. Other than the threat of Sandy, most of the scaling needs for the infrastructure were fairly predictable events like the debates and mass e-mails to supporters drove spikes in contributions and were handled without much fuss. Some of the many groups that the tech team enabled. Voting begins The Narwhal API could have easily been used to drive computerized "robocalls" to voters, but the philosophy of applications like Dashboard and Call Tool was that "you can't just make a difference through tech alone," Ecker said. "You can't just send e-mails and make robocalls and do stuff on Facebookthe real persuasion is going to happen when a real person is talking to a real person." And with the tools provided through Dashboard, real people could be just as effective as any robot at reaching thousands of real voters. During the final days of the campaign, Call Tool made it possible for volunteers outside of swing states to help volunteers in those states by placing calls to voters, augmenting their get-out-the-vote efforts. The tool was so effective, Ecker says, that "in some cases we ran out of people to call. We had so many volunteers using it, in some states we just called everybody." As early voting began and Election Day grew close, Narwhal demonstrated its flexibility further as more tools started pushing data into it. In addition to NGP VAN's get-out-the-vote toolan updated, smartphone friendly system analogous to Houdini and the Romney campaign's Orca in its function but based instead on social media inputsthe Obama campaign deployed a "voter incident tracker tool" based on an open-source PHP framework called Ushahidi. Originally developed for tracking humanitarian incidents, Ushahidi was the basis for an app used by pollwatcher volunteers to submit geo-tagged reports of potential problems, such as illegal electioneering or ballots being handled improperly. As reports came in, they were shown on a map in the Obama campaign's "boiler room," and the data was pushed to another applicationa lawyer-assignment appto dispatch volunteer lawyers if required to handle the situation or to gather resources for a possible court challenge. While the data collected ended up not mattering on a national level, Ecker said that it was being passed to statewide and other campaigns where it might have an impact. Adjustments to the apps were made right up until the end. Ecker says that on Election Day, the team observed that some of the open-source applications were causing "loads on our database that were making us a little uneasy," so the engineers assigned to the apps went in and hacked out unnecessary code that was causing the problem.

Through it all, the campaign's systems suffered less than 30 minutes of downtime over the course of the campaign. By 9:00 PM on Election Night, most of the staff was already at the McCormick Center in Chicago, awaiting Obama's victory speech. Tech was not the product Reed doesn't take credit for the success of the campaign. "I truly believe that the Obama campaign could have won without us," he said. "It would have been slower and would not have been efficient as it was in making voter contact. But we were a multiplier, not the cause." Nor does Reed see anything that the group did as truly groundbreaking from a technology standpoint. "When you break it down to programming, we didn't build a data store or a faster queue," he said. "All we did was put these pieces together and arrange them in the right order to give the field organization the tools they needed to do their job. And it worked out. It didn't hurt that we had a really great candidate and the best ground game that the world has ever seen." It also helped that Reed assembled people on his team who were willing to take point. Much of the success of the teams' efforts, he said, "is because of people like Clint, [Director of Engineering] Dylan Richard, and all these people that we hiredthey all know what they're doing. Being able to delegate that authority to them and say, hey guys, you've done this before, the conversation became 'here's how I did this' rather than 'how do we do this?' From there, all you're doing is fitting the puzzle pieces together." That doesn't mean that the team doesn't have reason to brag. "Looking back at all the stuff we produced, and the sophistication of the tools we produced," said Ecker, "we were able to build so much stuff that on the whole operated very well in just 20 months. If you look at a normal job, 20 months is what you spend on just one big project." But this is politics, and that means surprises are always possible. Despite all the planning, the team remains aware that it had a bit of luck on its side. "You could have the best technology team in the world, and add a bad product, and it won't work," Reed said. "Or your adoption is down, or for whatever reason it just doesn't catch on. Or a cloud provider goes away for a weekend, or you have what happened in 2008 when a guy hit a utility pole with a van and all of Rackspace went down in Dallas-Fort Worth. You never know." Washington Post: Obama Campaign Took Unorthodox Approach To Ad Buying http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-influence-industry-obama-campaign-took-unorthodoxapproach-to-ad-buying/2012/11/14/c3477e8c-2e87-11e2-beb2-4b4cf5087636_story.html By T.W. Farnam November 14, 2012 When President Obamas campaign strategists tried to squeeze every last drop of efficiency out of their $300 million television advertising budget, they chose to do something un-or-tho-dox: They stopped worrying about which shows featured their commercials. Most campaigns buy airtime based on television ratings for different demographic groups, selecting the shows they think likely voters will watch. In their attempts to find new efficiency, Obama aides threw that conventional wisdom out the window instead choosing airtime only by the time of day and the channel. The result was a system they called the optimizer that took into account information gathered from doorknockers and phone canvassers when they picked whether to advertise on, say, ESPN or TV Land.

The optimizer doesnt take into account the program at all, said Carol Davidsen, who designed the system as the campaigns director of media analytics. But theres a sanity check at the end to make sure that youre not advertising on Girls Gone Wild. Advertising prices are set by the size of the audience. The most expensive advertising is during prime-time network shows with massive numbers of viewers. Those reach lots of targeted voters, but theyll also waste money on people who have made up their minds. By finding the right programming, the campaign stitched together a big audience of targeted voters with less waste. The team bought detailed data on TV viewing by millions of cable subscribers, showing which channels they were watching, sometimes on a second-by-second basis. The information which is collected from set-top cable boxes and sold by a company called Rentrak doesnt show who was watching, but the campaign used a third-party company to match viewing data to its own internal list of voters and poll responses. Davidsen said the campaign sought to reach two broad categories of voters: people who were still on the fence and Obama supporters who were sporadic voters. The teams calculations showed that it would get the most bang for its buck in some strange places: the Family Channel, the Food Network and the Hallmark Channel, among others. On broadcast TV, the campaign went for more daytime programs and late-night entertainment shows than Republican nominee Mitt Romney did. The Obama team was on 60 channels during one week near the end of the campaign, compared with 18 for the Romney operation during the same period, according to cable advertising data. Overall, the Obama campaign ran a more sophisticated targeting operation, said Tim Kay, political sales director for NCC Media, a consortium of cable operators. With Romney, they went after pure tonnage, Kay said. With Obama, you see them capturing those niche audiences. They bought a lot of networks that we would consider second or third tier. Obamas campaign also would target cable operators serving small towns, while Romney tended to focus on media markets spanning several counties. I would agree they have done something new and interesting, said Will Feltus, a Republican media buyer who worked for George W. Bushs reelection campaign in 2004. They didnt invent the wheel, but they put some better ball bearings on it, thats for sure. Part of the reason for Obamas success in pushing the envelope was that he was flush with resources from the start and didnt face a primary challenger. The campaign decided to try the new approach more than a year ago, when Romney was battling Texas Gov. Rick Perry in the GOP primary. Nor was it cheap. The campaign paid at least $359,000 for Rentrak data and $70,500 to the Buckeye CableSystem, which serves part of Ohio, for data on its viewers, disclosure reports show. Using set-top boxes allowed for much more data and also higher accuracy. Nielsen Media Research ratings, which are more commonly used, are based on surveys that are still done with a written diary in some markets. Overall, Obama officials estimate they were able to get about 10 percent to 20 percent more efficient use of their money using the optimizer by piecing together small audiences.

In the past we might have said, Gee, theres not enough people watching there its not worth the money, said Jim Margolis, one of Obamas top media consultants. Theres a certain group that we want to speak to and you can reach them lots of different ways. Los Angeles Times: Obama Campaign's Investment In Data Crunching Paid Off http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-obama-analytics-20121113,0,846342.story By Christi Parsons and Kathleen Hennessey November 13, 2012 CHICAGO Early on election day, in two tight, tucked-away rooms at Obama headquarters known as the Cave and the Alley, the campaign's data-crunching team awaited the nation's first results, from Dixville Notch, a New Hampshire hamlet that traditionally votes at midnight. Dixville Notch split 5-5. It did not seem an auspicious outcome for the president. But for the math geeks and data wizards who spent more than a year devising sophisticated models to predict which voters would back the president, Dixville Notch was a victory. Their model had gotten it right, predicting that about 50% of the village's voters were likely to support President Obama. Daniel Wagner, the 29-year-old chief analytics officer, erupted in joy. The model was also projecting that Obama would be reelected. And as the night wore on, swing state after swing state came in with results that were very close to the model's prediction. For the nation, last Tuesday was election day. For Wagner's crew, it's now known as Model Validation Day. "We're kind of a weird bunch of kids," he said, standing near the Cave, where one wall was covered with a large canvas of a Martian landscape. "I haven't seen the sun in a while. We worked brutally inhuman hours this cycle. Twenty-hour days, often. But they bet a lot on us being right. And it was good to be right." For years, campaigns have used reams of information to predict voter behavior, relying on a science known as analytics. But Obama's advisors elevated the practice to new heights, very likely changing the way presidential campaigns will be conducted in the future. No other presidential campaign has so completely embraced this science. The campaign hired a team that topped out at 54 people and invested undisclosed millions in the effort. Analytics helped the campaign efficiently recruit volunteers, buy ads, tailor emails and mailers, raise money, dispatch surrogates and, most importantly, scour the swing states for hard-to-find voters most likely to support the president. Political guru David Plouffe and campaign manager Jim Messina made key decisions based on real-time reports from the geek squad, according to many people on the campaign's staff. "Our entire goal is to make the maximum use of our time and our volunteers' time. And that means using analytics across the campaign spectrum," Messina said after the election. "We invested unprecedented resources to do this because our entire theory was to get as micro-targeted to get as close to the ground as we could."

Another campaign official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak for the campaign, put it this way: "It's about turning over control to some nerds. And more than any other year, campaign leadership really took that leap of faith."

For campaign professionals, that is a major leap. Politics long has been ruled by truisms, conventional wisdom and intuition, with millions spent based on a murky mix of polling and focus groups. The shift to data-driven decision-making has been gradual and steady becoming increasingly sophisticated as political parties amass more information about individual voters through traditional means, such as polls, and new ones, such as data mining. The Obama campaign has made the transition over two elections. In this one, it employed analytics in a far more systematic and thorough way, officials said. But the work was a closely guarded secret. Officials denied requests for interviews with the analytics experts, and when journalists visited Obama headquarters, the team was ordered to shut the Cave door. Victory opened that door a crack. At its most basic, Messina, Wagner and others explained, the goal was to rank individual voters in the swing states based on their likelihood of voting for the president or of being persuaded to vote for him, to volunteer for his campaign and to vote early. The Obama campaign developed separate models for each. To build the "support model," the campaign in 2011 made thousands of calls to voters 5,000 to 10,000 in individual states, tens of thousands nationwide to find out whether they backed the president. Then it analyzed what those voters had in common. More than 80 different pieces of information were factored in including age, gender, voting history, home ownership and magazine subscriptions. Gigaom: How Obamas tech team helped deliver the 2012 election http://gigaom.com/cloud/how-obamas-tech-team-helped-deliver-the-2012-election/ Derrick Harris November 12, 2012 When it comes to presidential elections, it helps to know your way around some disruptive technologies. The team of technologists that helped re-elect Barack Obama led by Obama for America CTO Harper Reed and comprised largely of other political novices and accomplished hackers certainly had that going for them. However, when the prize is the highest office in the land and possibly the fate of the free world it also helps to know your role. A presidential campaign is not a tech startup; it has to innovate on tight deadlines and in an environment where failure really is not an option. So although it had to move fast, for example, Reeds team couldnt afford to re-invent the wheel because it could maybe shave 5 milliseconds off of page-load time for a web page. Or, as Reed put it a phone call with me on Monday morning: Our goal *was+ to be the force multiplier, not to be a technology experiment. It was there to make sure the presidents foot soldiers the folks who really do affect the results could execute their ground-game without having to worry about technology failing them. Reeds team just had to take the tools at its disposal and use them to their fullest extent so that old-world and potentially timeconsuming techniques such as calling phones and knocking on doors were done as efficiently as possible. For example, Reed explained, his team didnt invent the tool for making and handling phone calls, but it gave that tool legs. We made it so it could stand up and take all the calls, he said. Innovation was scale. Innovation was not falling down. Heres how Reed and company fulfilled their duty.

Reed (center rear) and team on election day. It made the cloud work for it Reed said the the vast majority of the campaigns infrastructure was hosted on Amazon Web Services, with only the analytics platform and some nominal other pieces residing on physical gear. This was a fairly big change from 2008, when Obama for America was running only a few minor tasks in the cloud. A reliable cloud service is a game-changer, he said, because smart campaigns no longer have to worry about buying servers, engaging contractors or negotiating software licenses. AWS, he said, was particularly helpful because of all the services it offers. In order to ensure visitors to President Obamas website had the same experience wherever they were located, the team decided to light up boxes all over *the country+ and use the CloudFront content-delivery network feature to route data from the closest virtual server. When it wanted a key-value store, it went to DynamoDB. As for that phone-call tool and the millions of calls it has to support, Auto-Scaling, a method for adding additional resources in mere minutes, saved the day. We used the hell out of it, Reed said. When volume was higher than expected, he added, we could just turn that to 11. even when the cloud crashed But relying so heavily on the cloud wasnt always easy, because the cloud isnt always reliable. Amazons cloud went down a few times between June 2012 and election day including as late as Oct. 22 and brought a lot of web properties down with it. Both times we survived, Reed said, but it was hard. Obama for America stayed online because it embraced devops (the tight alignment between application development, engineering and operations that cloud computing enables) and the smart architectural strategies employed by cloud computing pioneers such as Netflix. (Paraphrasing a discussion thread from popular programming site Hacker News, Reed joked that if a developer can still use Netflix while AWS is down, then the developer screwed up. If Netflix is down, then AWS is really down.) That means spending a little more money to replicate databases and applications across geographic regions and generally being smarter about where the various application components run and how theyre connected to each other. AWS gives you tools to do amazing things, he explained, but youre responsible for screwing it up. At the beginning, he added, everything might be chill and people are working on how to creatively architect a reliable cloud application, but eventually you start valuing uptime over experimentation. At that point, you just have to accept the gravity of your mission and say were going all in. Reed thinks keeping applications up in the cloud will get easier thanks to some of the innovative companies and technologies working in that space. He pointed to cloud-management company RightScale, the Tungsten Replicator engine for MySQL and the general platform-as-a-service space as things he thinks are really cool but werent quite ready for primetime in 2012 at least for something as deadline- and mission-critical as a presidential campaign. It understood how the web works Aside the from finer points of cloud computing infrastructure, Reed said Obamas tech team also really understood how the web has evolved since 2008. Take, for example, the advent of Twitter and Facebook as forces to be reckoned with in terms of voter engagement. Then-candidate Obama got a lot of attention for his 5 millionish social media connections, but President Obama now has roughly 10 times that many across Facebook and Twitter. Thats a lot of people from which to spark a network effect, and a lot of data to analyze.

Being able to work at that scale is amazing, Reed said. And its not the just the presidents follower counts that have grown social media platforms have evolved significantly and people are far more familiar with how they work. Facebook Pages, for example, were created after 2008 in part because having profile pages for candidates and companies didnt work out too well, and Facebook Connect didnt exist either. Twitter has also grown into a widely popular platform, while MySpace is all but gone. Reed said it was critical that team Obama take the platforms built in the four years between elections and use them the way they are being used today. Or take the details of how people access those sites to begin with. The presidents technology team knew (no doubt thanks in part to its analytics team that has received so much attention post-election for its data mining efforts) that voters in urban areas where Obama was counting on high voter turnout were more likely to use a mobile phone rather than a laptop as their primary means of internet access. Theyre also more likely to use Android devices than iOS devices, as are many potential swing voters who generally dont care too much about technology. So, Reed said, the team designed apps to run on multiple operating systems and used responsive design to ensure apps ran well on whatever devices voters were using. It disrupted with data Reeds team worked closely with that vaunted analytics team, he said, and what the Obama for America team really did better than Mitt Romneys team was disrupt the status quo with regard to how it used data. Hes not too keen on jumping on the bandwagon calling out the failings of Romneys Project Orca (I never would wish technology failing on any sort of opponent or enemy, Reed said) but he will acknowledge that the analytics team Obama had been putting together for more than a year leading into the election was a major differnentiator. He compares the advanced modeling and analytic techniques of his comrades and guys like Nate Silver to MP3s, thus making traditional pollsters and political experts akin to the music industry. They both had been going about their business for decades without competition, and they both reacted violently when their worlds were disrupted. However, these are smart people, and Reed expects theyll come around in the next election cycles. But for now, he said, Thats a hard position to be in when youre no longer relevant. It had a great leader In the end, though, Reed thinks the success of Obamas campaign all boiled down to having a good leader. It wasnt just Obamas good fortune of running in during the era of Twitter and Amazon Web Services that let him forever change the way campaigns are run. The president is the one who set the tone about how the campaign would function and what it would focus on, Reed said, and the president put in place the campaign leaders who followed through on his vision by hiring the right people down the chain. If Reed does come back to politics, it will take another candidate with Obamas vision and ability to generate excitement among the populace to get him back in the saddle. But for now, Reed said, Im definitely ready for a little break. Tech Crunch: Premature Facebook Election Hype, A Response to The Atlantic http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/11/pre-mature-facebook-election-hype-a-response-to-theatlantic/ Gregory Ferenstein November 11, 2012

If social media mattered in elections, Ron Paul would have likely been the Republican presidential candidate, not Mitt Romney. Despite being the conversational hub of the election, Facebook is neither the place where politically influential demographics congregate nor where undecided citizens go to think deeply about issues. Our friends at The Atlantic ran a fascinating and well-researched piece about whether Facebook gave Democrats an advantage on Election Day, especially given their pull with young voters. Unfortunately, the article overestimates how political consequential young voters are, If no one under the age of 30 had voted, Obama would have won every state he carried with the exception of two: Indiana and North Carolina, wrote Chuck Todd and Sheldon Gawiser in How Barack Obama Won (in 2008). The centerpiece of author Rebecca Rosens argument is a recent large-scale, randomized study, which proved that users who broadcast their intention to vote on Election Day can boost turnout among their friends. The study found that Facebook has an extraordinarily powerful effect on the spread of messages, essentially quadrupling the influence as friends share it throughout an ever expanding network. Facebooks effect however big it is is at the margins, and in a country where elections are so close, the margins can matter a lot, surmises Rosen. Unfortunately, the total impact on turnout is only about 2 percent a significant figure for a message, but not nearly enough to sway an election. In response to questions about how the message impacted users, The studys author, Dr. James Fowler, tells me over email, older people were more influenced by the treatment in 2010, but there is no evidence that ideology played a role or that one party was more favored than another. Additionally, he says, one thing you might point out is that there was only a 1% increase in voter turnout among the young. Indeed, as Ive argued before, the power of young voters is a myth. They comprise about 18 percent of the voting electorate (19 percent this year, if reports of slightly higher turnout are to be believed). Moreover, the once Obama-enchanted demographic of 20-somethings lost faith in the harbinger of hope, and his overall support among young voters dropped around 6 percent (probably from 66 percent to 60 percent). In a state like Ohio, young voters may have made a difference (by about 12,000 votes), but not enough for Facebook to be the pivotal factor. Facebook only influences a fraction for any particular group not enough to make up for Obamas thumping of Romney. The social media election myth may persist because its reasonable to believe that, given the sheer volume of activity on Facebook, it has to have an effect, right?!. One explanation for the Grand Canyon-size discrepancy between action and online discussion is that the growth in social media has paralleled a new behavioral trend in young voters: the rise of non-voting civically engaged citizens. University of California, Irvine Professor Russell Dalton argues that this demographic finds more meaning in making political videos, attending an Occupy Wall Street camp, or boycotting companies with Republican ties than performing traditional acts of civic duty, such as voting or jury duty. In fairness to non-voters, a single vote isnt a terribly influential way to change government; so its reasonable that a generation of makers wants something more. Facebook has empowered countless new ways to engage with democracy, but young people have ceded their power in elections in the process. Now, in fairness to The Atlantic, it is reasonable to suspect that the Internet does not have the exact same impact on both parties. Ive argued before that the Internet inherently advantages liberals because, on average, their greater psychological embrace of disruption leads to more innovation (after all, nearly every major digital breakthrough, from online fundraising to the use of big data, was pioneered by Democrats).

But, for now, dont get swept up in the social media hype. There are too many 20-somethings on Facebook and Twitter for social media to make much of a difference. *A previous version of this article caused some confusion by rounding numbers and not explicitly incorporating the magnitude of Facebook in Ohio. If Obama won by 103,519 votes in Ohio, then the 2.2% effect by Facebook would not likely have swung the vote for Obama, especially since the Facebook effect is not partisan and slightly skewed towards older voters. Though, the margins are close and Ill write a follow up once we have all the numbers and an update from Facebook on its effect for 2012. All Facebook: Did Facebook engagement translate to wins in key congressional races http://allfacebook.com/did-facebook-engagement-translate-to-wins-in-key-congressional-races_b104168 Jennifer Moire November 9, 2012 The 2012 election postmortems continue, and research published in Capitol Hill newspaper Politico indicates that congressional candidates with the social media mettle to engage their Facebook fan bases got muchneeded bumps on Election Day. While candidates experimented with niche platforms like Pinterest and Spotify, Twitter and Facebook were the dominant platforms in election 2012. Facebook was called by one strategist the 800-pound gorilla of this cycle. We heard about the importance of engagement from Republicans and Democrats, alike. With the votes counted, Democratic strategists Matthew MacWilliams and Edward Erikson put some data behind the hypothesis. The pair explored the relationship between fan base and fan engagement in 33 of the most competitive races for the U.S. House of Representatives and all 33 U.S. Senate races over a three-month period. Senate Races According to their data, eight out of nine Senate races considered to be tossups this year were won by the candidates with the more engaged Facebook fan bases. In North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Nevada, those candidates won when the major party candidates had comparable fan page numbers. Campaigns in Virginia, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Indiana were also won by those candidates with the most engaged Facebook fan bases, even though their bases were smaller than those of their opponents. All but the Nevada race were won by Democrats. The report examines in detail the Massachusetts Senate race between winner and Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren and incumbent Scott Brown. According to the study, 32 percent of Warrens social network more than 100,000 fans were liking, commenting, and sharing news about her campaign on Facebook on Election Day, while Brown engaged about 12 percent, or some 45,000 people. How did she do it? On Election Day, Warren posted on Facebook nine times, sharing everything from images to text, videos, and links. Get-out-the-vote information was popular, as well as photos that were just plain cute or personal like the image of Brown and her husband voting. The authors said Warrens posts were more inspirational and appealed to voters core values and emotions, while Browns posts were more transactional and less engaging, despite both sharing similar messages that urged voters to vote. House Races

Senate candidates werent the only ones to benefit from Facebook. A total of 20 of the 33 most competitive House races across the country Tuesday were won by candidates with measurable Facebook fan engagement advantages, according to MacWilliams and Erikson. In six out of nine House open seat races, the candidates with engagement advantages won. And in 11 of the 15 competitive House races where incumbents lost Tuesday, the challengers enjoyed engagement advantages over the incumbents. Conclusion The piece doesnt go so far as to say that engagement numbers directly resulted in wins. That would be a stretch, since most strategists say that a mix of traditional campaign tactics TV/radio advertising, canvassing, and phone banks with social is still needed. An effective outreach strategy for campaigns needs to include a social component that looks beyond raw fan numbers to how those fans are touched and with what kind of information. That was evident in the presidential race, where an engagement focus didnt seem to help Mitt Romneys campaign. Romneys digital strategist, Zac Moffatt, was an advocate for engagement metrics, rather than looking at raw fan numbers. President Barack Obama consistently bested Romney in fan page likes though Romney had a respectable following. Moffatt says his team focused on metrics like talking about. At key points in the race, Romney beat President Barack Obama in engagement, although some say that was because the former governor had fewer likes. Romney running mate Paul Ryan had a very strong Facebook base far stronger than that of Vice President Joe Biden. Clearly, other factors are at play. But a focus on Facebook engagement is worth the investment. Just ask Jim Matheson, who won his Utah House race, and newcomer Ted Cruz, who became the first Hispanic voted to the U.S. Senate from Texas. The Atlantic: Did Facebook give democrats the upper hand? http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/did-facebook-give-democrats-the-upperhand/264937/# Rebecca J. Rosen November 8, 2012 You didn't know it at the time, but when you logged into Facebook on Election Day, you became a subject in a mass social experiment. You went about your day, clicked around Facebook, and you may have voted. Now your behavior is data that social scientists will scrutinize in the months ahead, asking one of the core questions of democracy: What makes people vote? If patterns from earlier research hold true, the experiment's designer James Fowler says that it is "absolutely plausible that Facebook drove a lot of the increase" in young-voter participation (thought to be up one percentage point from 2008 as a share of the electorate). It is, he continued, "even possible that Facebook is completely responsible." Assuming you are over the age of 18 and were using a computer in the United States, you probably saw at the top of your Facebook page advising you that, surprise, it was Election Day. There was a link where you could find your polling place, a button that said either "I'm voting" or I'm a voter," and pictures of the faces of friends who had already declared they had voted, which also appeared in your News Feed. If you saw something like that, you were in good company: 94 percent of 18-and-older U.S. Facebook users got that treatment, assigned randomly, of course.* Though it's not yet known how many people that is, in a similar experiment performed in 2010, the number was *60 million*. Presumably it was even more on Tuesday, as Facebook has grown substantially in the past two years. But here's the catch: six percent of people didn't get the intervention. Two percent saw nothing -- no message, no button, no news stories. Another two percent saw the message but no stories of friends' voting

behavior populated their feeds, and a final two percent saw only the social content but no message at the top. By splitting up the population into these experimental and control groups, researchers will be able to see if the messages had any effect on voting behavior when they begin matching the Facebook users to the voter rolls (whom a person voted for is private information, but whether they voted is public). If those who got the experimental treatment voted in greater numbers, as is expected, Fowler and his team will be able to have a pretty good sense of just how many votes in the 2012 election came directly as a result of Facebook. In a country where elections can turn on just a couple hundred votes, it's not far-fetched to say that Facebook's efforts to improve voter participation could swing an election, if they haven't already. They've done a very similar experiment before, and the results were significant. In a paper published earlier this year in Nature, Fowler and his colleagues announced that a Facebook message and behavior-sharing communication increased the probability that a person votes by slightly more than 2 percent. That may not seem like a huge effect, but when you have a huge population, as Facebook does, a small uptick in probability means substantial changes in voting behavior. "Our results suggest," the team wrote, "that the Facebook social message increased turnout directly by about 60,000 voters and indirectly through social contagion by another 280,000 voters, for a total of 340,000 additional votes." This finding -- remarkable and novel as it may be -- is in concert with earlier research that has shown that voting is strongly influenced by social pressure, such as in this 2008 study which found that people were significantly more likely to vote if they received mailings promising to later report neighborhood-wide who had voted and who had stayed at home. Although months of door knocking, phone calls, and other traditional campaign tactics surely bring more people to the polls, those measures are expensive and labor-intensive. Nothing seems to come even close to a Facebook message's efficacy in increasing voter turnout. "When we were trying to get published," Fowler, a professor at UC San Diego, told me, "We had reviewers who said, 'These results are so small that they're meaningless,' and other reviewers who said, 'These results are implausibly large. There's no way this can be true.' " In a country where elections can turn on just a couple hundred votes, it's not far-fetched to say that, down the road, Facebook's efforts to improve voter participation could swing an election, if they haven't already. Now it must be said that of course Facebook is not trying to elect Democrats. Facebook has an admirable civic virtue and has long tried to increase democratic participation in a strictly nonpartisan way. "Facebook," Fowler said to me, "wants everyone to be more likely to vote. Facebook wants everyone to participate in the fact of democracy." But that doesn't mean the effects of Facebook's efforts are not lopsided. Outside of Facebook's demographic particularities, there are reasons to believe that improved voter turnout in general helps Democrats, though there is a debate about this within political science. In practice, though, there is no such thing as pure a get-out-the-vote, one whose tide raises all votes, and Facebook is no exception. It skews toward both women and younger voters, two groups which tended to prefer Democrats on Tuesday. Eighteen-to-29-year-olds voted 60 percent for Obama, compared with 37 percent for Romney. The next-older age group, 30-to-44-year-olds, gave Obama 52 percent of their support. Among Americans older than 45, Romney won. The implication is clear: If Facebook provides a cheap and effective way to get more people to the polls, and it seems that it does, that is good news for Democrats. For Republicans, well, it's an uncomfortable situation when increasing voter participation is a losing strategy. Facebook's effect -- however big it is -- is at the margins, and in a country where elections are so close, the margins can matter a lot. But there are long-term trends underfoot that, for Republicans, mean their

troubles go beyond Facebook. This year was the third presidential election in a row where young-voter participation hovered around 50 percent (meaning that half of eligible young people actually voted), Peter Levine of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University told me, and this is up from a low of just 37 percent in 1996. Obviously, that sort of shift is not the result of a Facebook message. "This seems to be a significant generational change," he said. The reasons for this generational change are complex and not totally understood. One certain factor is simply that recent campaigns have tried harder to reach out to young people. "In the 1990s the conventional wisdom was that young people don't vote," Levine said. "So they would literally look through a contact list of potential voters to reach out to, and just delete the young people -- not to discriminate but because they were trying to be efficient." "In the 1990s the conventional wisdom was that young people don't vote," Levine said. "So they would literally look through a contact list of potential voters to reach out to, and just delete the young people." But that ended with what Levine calls the "50/50 nation situation" -- elections so close that campaigns could no longer afford to write off huge parts of the population. "It had already begun to change, but Obama won on the strength of young votes in '08 -- not only in the general election but especially in the primaries. They gave him Iowa. Without Iowa, no President Obama." For years it was thought that one reason young people voted in such low numbers is because they are so mobile: If you don't live in a place for years, voting is, as political scientists term it, "costly." You have to reregister every time you move, find your polling place, and, if you plan to vote in local races, spend time getting up-to-speed on complicated municipal politics. But this calculus of inaction may be changing: With the Internet, it's much easier to find where your polling place is. And our online media environment privileges national politics over local politics so much, that national politics alone may entice more people to the polls. Additionally, Constance Flanagan of the University of Wisconsin argues, there's been a backlash on college campuses to voter-suppression efforts. "The voter-suppression thing did make people more aware," she said. "Our university newspaper had a front-page story about what are your rights, do you have to produce an ID. ... It was a conversation topic among young people and something they passed on to one another." Particularly, she said, that minority groups who felt targeted really responded by organizing themselves and making sure people voted. (Ta-Nehisi Coates and Andrew Cohen have both written about this backlash here at The Atlantic.) Even with these recent improvements, Levine reminds us to bear in mind that we're still only at 50 percent, and the other 50 percent, those who are not voting, is not a random sample of the population -- typically lower income, lower education levels, and not into politics. With social media becoming an increasingly important part of political communications, campaigns and activists should ask whether there's any way to use social media to get to them. "I think we do incrementally, because there's some serendipity where your old high school friend gets into politics and draws you in, but does it happen at a large scale? I don't think we know," he said. All of this adds up to a shifting electoral environment, as young people come out to the polls in greater numbers, and are more easily reached online. "In terms of good news for the Democrats," Donald Green of Columbia University told me, "the fact that you have this age cohort that has been socialized into very strong presidential support for Democrats, is in some ways the countervailing force to the age cohort that was socialized into strong Republican support under Reagan." Voting once is known to be habit forming. Those

who were brought to the polls by the wave of enthusiasm for Obama in 2008 will likely vote in greater numbers for the rest of their lives, even in a more humdrum election, as this one felt. And that's perhaps the worst news of all for the Republicans. A wave of enthusiasm is one thing, an anomaly in an otherwise 50/50 nation. But now the tide has gone out, and the seashore looks changed. Politico: The Facebook bump http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83572.html Matthew MacWilliams and Edward Erikson November 8, 2012 If campaigns were won and lost by the number of Facebook fans a candidate recruits, Senator Scott Brown would have defeated Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday: 370,536 fans to 316,312. But instead Warren pulled out a narrow victory at the polls. While Brown had more Facebook fans than Warren, Warrens campaign did a superior job of engaging her fan base. On Election Day, 32 percent of Warrens social network over 100,000 fans were liking, commenting, and sharing news about her campaign on Facebook. Brown, on the other hand, engaged just 12 percent of his network or about 45,000 people. Did Warrens savvy social media skills give her a Facebook bump that helped to propel her to victory? What impact did Facebook have on other competitive Senate and House races across the country? Social media has finally come of age in America. Over 150 million adults in the U.S. are now registered Facebook users. Each month, the average American spends about 7 hours and forty-five minutes on social media which makes up about twenty-two percent of the total time Americans spend online. During the 2010 election, political scientist James Fowler demonstrated the political power of Facebook. He helped to deliver and track 61 million get-out-the-vote messages that increased voter turnout by an estimated 340,000. This year, almost every serious candidate for federal office invested in a Facebook page and strategy. To measure the impact of Facebook on election outcomes in 2012, we analyzed the relationship between fan base and fan engagement in thirty-three of the most competitive House races and all thirty-three Senate races over a three-month period. The initial results of our study are compelling: candidates with the skills to engage supporters enjoyed a Facebook bump on Election Day. Eight out of nine Senate races considered to be toss ups this year were won by the candidate with the more engaged Facebook fan base. In the North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Nevada Senate races, where the major party candidates had comparable fan networks, the candidate with the more engaged fan base won. Senate campaigns in Virginia, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Indiana were also won by those candidates with the most engaged Facebook fan base even though their bases were smaller than their opponents. For example, in Virginia, Tim Kaines fan base was one half the size of George Allens, but Kaines base was 4.5 times more active and engaged. And in Montana, Senator Jon Tester won the trifecta: he enjoyed a larger and more engaged Facebook fan base than his opponent and won re-election. Only in the Arizona Senate race did a more engaged fan base fail to correlate with victory on Election Day. House candidates experienced similar success on Facebook. Twenty of the 33 most competitive House races across the country on Tuesday were won by candidates with a measurable Facebook fan engagement advantage. The candidate engagement advantage translated into victories in House open seat and challenger races. In six out of nine House open seat races, the candidate with an engagement advantage won. And in 11 of the 15 competitive House races where incumbents lost on Tuesday, the challenger enjoyed an engagement advantage over the incumbent.

Tuesdays results indicate that the value of Facebook cannot be measured by the size of a candidates following; the significance relies on how well campaigns activate fans. The Warren campaigns approach to social media exemplifies how campaigns can use Facebook to engage their base. On Election Day, Warren posted on Facebook nine times. The posts included images, text, videos, and links. They were informational a link for people to help find a polling place. They were cute a bull dog wearing a Warren t-shirt. They were personal a photo of Warren and her husband at the voting booth. And they were inspirational a call for more get-out-the-vote volunteers. Warren delivered content that connected with voters, motivated her base and drove support. She appealed to core values, emotions, and reason. Brown, on the other hand, fell short. He posted to his Facebook page three times on Election Day. While he utilized images well, his posts were transactional and not engaging. Each one repeated the same message: vote. From the most expensive Senate campaigns to more modest House races, our initial analysis indicates that candidates, who creatively embrace Facebook and the daily grind of building and engaging an audience, will be rewarded with a meaningful voting bump on Election Day that makes their time spent on social media well worth the effort. TIME: Inside the secret world of the data crunchers who helped Obama win http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-whohelped-obama-win/ Michael Scherer November 7, 2012 In late spring, the backroom number crunchers who powered Barack Obamas campaign to victory noticed that George Clooney had an almost gravitational tug on West Coast females ages 40 to 49. The women were far and away the single demographic group most likely to hand over cash, for a chance to dine in Hollywood with Clooney and Obama. So as they did with all the other data collected, stored and analyzed in the two-year drive for re-election, Obamas top campaign aides decided to put this insight to use. They sought out an East Coast celebrity who had similar appeal among the same demographic, aiming to replicate the millions of dollars produced by the Clooney contest. We were blessed with an overflowing menu of options, but we chose Sarah Jessica Parker, explains a senior campaign adviser. And so the next Dinner with Barack contest was born: a chance to eat at Parkers West Village brownstone. For the general public, there was no way to know that the idea for the Parker contest had come from a datamining discovery about some supporters: affection for contests, small dinners and celebrity. But from the beginning, campaign manager Jim Messina had promised a totally different, metric-driven kind of campaign in which politics was the goal but political instincts might not be the means. We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign, he said after taking the job. He hired an analytics department five times as large as that of the 2008 operation, with an official chief scientist for the Chicago headquarters named Rayid Ghani, who in a previous life crunched huge data sets to, among other things, maximize the efficiency of supermarket sales promotions. Exactly what that team of dozens of data crunchers was doing, however, was a closely held secret. They are our nuclear codes, campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt would say when asked about the efforts. Around the office, data-mining experiments were given mysterious code names such as Narwhal and Dreamcatcher. The team even worked at a remove from the rest of the campaign staff, setting up shop in a windowless room at the north end of the vast headquarters office. The scientists created regular briefings on their work for the President and top aides in the White Houses Roosevelt Room, but public details were in short supply as the

campaign guarded what it believed to be its biggest institutional advantage over Mitt Romneys campaign: its data. On Nov. 4, a group of senior campaign advisers agreed to describe their cutting-edge efforts with TIME on the condition that they not be named and that the information not be published until after the winner was declared. What they revealed as they pulled back the curtain was a massive data effort that helped Obama raise $1 billion, remade the process of targeting TV ads and created detailed models of swing-state voters that could be used to increase the effectiveness of everything from phone calls and door knocks to direct mailings and social media. How to Raise $1 Billion For all the praise Obamas team won in 2008 for its high-tech wizardry, its success masked a huge weakness: too many databases. Back then, volunteers making phone calls through the Obama website were working off lists that differed from the lists used by callers in the campaign office. Get-out-the-vote lists were never reconciled with fundraising lists. It was like the FBI and the CIA before 9/11: the two camps never shared data. We analyzed very early that the problem in Democratic politics was you had databases all over the place, said one of the officials. None of them talked to each other. So over the first 18 months, the campaign started over, creating a single massive system that could merge the information collected from pollsters, fundraisers, field workers and consumer databases as well as social-media and mobile contacts with the main Democratic voter files in the swing states. The new megafile didnt just tell the campaign how to find voters and get their attention; it also allowed the number crunchers to run tests predicting which types of people would be persuaded by certain kinds of appeals. Call lists in field offices, for instance, didnt just list names and numbers; they also ranked names in order of their persuadability, with the campaigns most important priorities first. About 75% of the determining factors were basics like age, sex, race, neighborhood and voting record. Consumer data about voters helped round out the picture. We could *predict+ people who were going to give online. We could model people who were going to give through mail. We could model volunteers, said one of the senior advisers about the predictive profiles built by the data. In the end, modeling became something way bigger for us in 12 than in 08 because it made our time more efficient. Early on, for example, the campaign discovered that people who had unsubscribed from the 2008 campaign e-mail lists were top targets, among the easiest to pull back into the fold with some personal attention. The strategists fashioned tests for specific demographic groups, trying out message scripts that they could then apply. They tested how much better a call from a local volunteer would do than a call from a volunteer from a nonswing state like California. As Messina had promised, assumptions were rarely left in place without numbers to back them up. MORE: TIME Staff: Live Twitter Reactions The new megafile also allowed the campaign to raise more money than it once thought possible. Until August, everyone in the Obama orbit had protested loudly that the campaign would not be able to reach the mythical $1 billion fundraising goal. We had big fights because we wouldnt even accept a goal in the 900s, said one of the senior officials who was intimately involved in the process. And then the Internet exploded over the summer, said another. A large portion of the cash raised online came through an intricate, metric-driven e-mail campaign in which dozens of fundraising appeals went out each day. Here again, data collection and analysis were paramount. Many of the e-mails sent to supporters were just tests, with different subject lines, senders and messages. Inside the campaign, there were office pools on which combination would raise the most money, and often

the pools got it wrong. Michelle Obamas e-mails performed best in the spring, and at times, campaign boss Messina performed better than Vice President Joe Biden. In many cases, the top performers raised 10 times as much money for the campaign as the underperformers. Chicago discovered that people who signed up for the campaigns Quick Donate program, which allowed repeat giving online or via text message without having to re-enter credit-card information, gave about four times as much as other donors. So the program was expanded and incentivized. By the end of October, Quick Donate had become a big part of the campaigns messaging to supporters, and first-time donors were offered a free bumper sticker to sign up. Predicting Turnout The magic tricks that opened wallets were then repurposed to turn out votes. The analytics team used four streams of polling data to build a detailed picture of voters in key states. In the past month, said one official, the analytics team had polling data from about 29,000 people in Ohio alone a whopping sample that composed nearly half of 1% of all voters there allowing for deep dives into exactly where each demographic and regional group was trending at any given moment. This was a huge advantage: when polls started to slip after the first debate, they could check to see which voters were changing sides and which were not. It was this database that helped steady campaign aides in Octobers choppy waters, assuring them that most of the Ohioans in motion were not Obama backers but likely Romney supporters whom Romney had lost because of his September blunders. We were much calmer than others, said one of the officials. The polling and voter-contact data were processed and reprocessed nightly to account for every imaginable scenario. We ran the election 66,000 times every night, said a senior official, describing the computer simulations the campaign ran to figure out Obamas odds of winning each swing state. And every morning we got the spit-out here are your chances of winning these states. And that is how we allocated resources. Online, the get-out-the-vote effort continued with a first-ever attempt at using Facebook on a mass scale to replicate the door-knocking efforts of field organizers. In the final weeks of the campaign, people who had downloaded an app were sent messages with pictures of their friends in swing states. They were told to click a button to automatically urge those targeted voters to take certain actions, such as registering to vote, voting early or getting to the polls. The campaign found that roughly 1 in 5 people contacted by a Facebook pal acted on the request, in large part because the message came from someone they knew. Data helped drive the campaigns ad buying too. Rather than rely on outside media consultants to decide where ads should run, Messina based his purchases on the massive internal data sets. We were able to put our target voters through some really complicated modeling, to say, O.K., if Miami-Dade women under 35 are the targets, *here is+ how to reach them, said one official. As a result, the campaign bought ads to air during unconventional programming, like Sons of Anarchy, The Walking Dead and Dont Trust the B- in Apt. 23, skirting the traditional route of buying ads next to local news programming. How much more efficient was the Obama campaign of 2012 than 2008 at ad buying? Chicago has a number for that: On TV we were able to buy 14% more efficiently to make sure we were talking to our persuadable voters, the same official said. The numbers also led the campaign to escort their man down roads not usually taken in the late stages of a presidential campaign. In August, Obama decided to answer questions on the social news website Reddit, which many of the Presidents senior aides did not know about. Why did we put Barack Obama on Reddit? an official asked rhetorically. Because a whole bunch of our turnout targets were on Reddit.

That data-driven decisionmaking played a huge role in creating a second term for the 44th President and will be one of the more closely studied elements of the 2012 cycle. Its another sign that the role of the campaign pros in Washington who make decisions on hunches and experience is rapidly dwindling, being replaced by the work of quants and computer coders who can crack massive data sets for insight. As one official put it, the time of guys sitting in a back room smoking cigars, saying We always buy 60 Minutes is over. In politics, the era of big data has arrived. CNet: The post-election tech tally: winners and losers http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57546443-38/the-post-election-tech-tally-winners-and-losers/ CNET News Staff November 7, 2012 Elections are all about winners and losers, who is up and who is down. Here's a CNET look at the winners and losers in the 2012 election in which President Obama bested former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, from a tech perspective. WINNERS Nate Silver: The FiveThirtyEight forecaster's algorithms correctly calculated that on election day President Obama had a nearly 92-percent chance of winning, and accurately projected the voting outcome in 49 states (Florida has not yet been called). Read: Obama's win a big vindication for Nate Silver, king of the quants Big data: Many, especially in the Republican camp, were skeptical of the predictions offered by Silver and other data crunchers. But it turned out that Silver and his peers were able to predict with high accuracy how the contest for the White House and other races would play out. Data mining and analysis have become a key currency that drives results in elections, just like any other business. "A tremendous amount of info is collected and available. It's going to change the business of politics," said Jascha Franklin-Hodge of BlueStateDigital, which works with Obama campaign. "It will allow campaigns to be more effective in their messaging. More effective in finding the right people to engage in the right ways, at the right time of day, through the right platforms, to give people experiences that are more tailored to them, and more compelling for them." Read: Time: Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win Quants: Are you a math wiz and quantitative analyst who isn't working for Google, Goldman Sachs or Obama? There are high-paying jobs for people who have the skills that can help companies better predict the future and bend outcomes. Social media: According to the Pew Research Center, 22 percent of registered voters shared how they voted with others on social networking sites. In addition, the survey showed that 30 percent of registered voters were encouraged to vote for a presidential candidate via input received on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook from friends and family (Credit: Pew Research Center) Twitter: An estimated 32 million tweets referencing the U.S. presidential election were sent Tuesday, with more than 23 million sent after the first polls closed this afternoon. Activity peaked at 8:19 p.m. PT when the major TV networks declared Obama the president, generating 327,452 tweets per minute, Twitter said. That surpassed the 85,273 tweets per minute that accompanied the announcement that Iowa's electoral votes

had gone to Obama just seven minutes earlier. Also, Twitter stood up to the challenge without buckling on the record-setting day for the service. Read: Obama 'four more years' tweet skyrockets to No. 1 retweet Reddit: Obama held a Q&A on Reddit during the campaign, and summoned voters via Reddit on election day. In August, the president answered nine questions, and Reddit users talked back with more than 13,600 comments as the site was brought to its knees. "Our team pitched it because it's a big community of folks who are driving a lot of the conversation. It's the homepage of the Internet, and we wanted to be part of it," said Joe Rospars, the Obama campaign's chief digital strategist. Read: Obama returns to Reddit to drum up last-minute votes Facebook: More than 9.6 million Facebook users of voting age signaled to their social networks that they voted through the "I Voted" button Facebook made available, according to the social network. That compared to 5.4 million clicks in 2008, when Facebook only had 35.5 million U.S. users. It now has about 171 million users in the U.S. The company's data team used a "Talk Meter" yesterday to measure the overall chatter around the event and any terms associated with the Election, ranking them on a scale of 1 - 10. The Talk Meter is used for other events, including the presidential debates. Election 2012 buzz came in at a 9.27. This is in comparison to the 2008 presidential election, which drew an 8.95. Read: Obama victory photo smashes Facebook 'Like' record Joe Rospars (Credit: BlueStateDigital) Joe Rospars: The Obama campaign's digital wizard from BlueStateDigital has steered through two straight elections and defined how digital media is used to support candidates. For comparison, the president has nearly 23 million Twitter followers and more than nearly 33 million Facebook 'likes'; Romney has less than 1.8 million Twitter followers and 12.1 million Facebook 'Likes.' Online advertising: The money is beginning to flow from TV and radio to online, including mobile devices. "Nothing else has the scale and flexibility of digital....This is the first campaign in history where digital advertising moves from a list building and fundraising application to persuasion and mobilization.... It's the first step in television moving away as the only source, said Zac Moffat, Romney's digital director. Instagram: The Facebook-owned photo-sharing service officially became another prominent way to capture the zeitgeist of the election, in hundreds of thousands of images. The New York Times, among others, curated Instagram photos from election day to capture the experience. Read: An Election Day Instagram is worth a thousand tweets Instagram photos curated by the New York Times Startups: The election provided some opportunities for startups to hitch a ride with campaigns. While the Obama team developed more of their own technology over the last six years, the Romney campaign utilized Rally.org and Square for fundraising activities, for example. Read: Pando Daily: In the Red Corner, Zac Moffatt Leads Romney's Digital Drive to Topple Obama LOSERS

Romney's digital campaign: While Romney's team couldn't alter the demographics that ultimately doomed his presidential aspirations, his digital operation couldn't keep up with Obama's, which better leveraged the social networks and data at its disposal to get out the vote in the right places and raise money from small donors. Read: TechPresident: For Romney's Digital Campaign, a Second-Place Finish Pundits who thought Nate Silver was crazy: Karl Rove, Dick Morris, George Will, Michael Barone, Joe Scarborough and others who were dismissive of the quantitative polling analysis by Silver and others forecasting the statistical probability that Obama would reach the 270 electoral votes needed to win reelection. Google+: While Facebook and Twitter are publishing data touting election day activity, Google hasn't had much to say about the activity on its social network. On the other hand, Google's voter information data, which helped voters locate their polling places and find information on candidates, was used over 22 million times Tuesday, Google said. FREEP: Voters document election on social media http://www.freep.com/print/article/20121107/NEWS15/121107005/Presidential-election-social-mediaTwitter-Facebook-YouTube Marisol Bello November 7, 2012 The first national election in which social media went mainstream unfolded Tuesday as voters posted comments about long lines, photos of their ballots and, in one case that went viral, a video of a voting machine gone rogue. On Twitter, the popular site for short bursts of breaking news, users were tweeting 11,000 election-related posts per minute. Before most polls closed, the hashtag "#election2012" surpassed 11 million tweets. Election Day became the most tweeted-about event in U.S. political history with 20 million tweets, Twitter posted Tuesday night. Users quickly posted congratulations and cheers when media outlets declared President Obama the winner after he was projected to win Ohio. Obama's Twitter feed posted "Four more years" after TV networks declared him the winner. The post was retweeted more than 225,000 times. The digital news site BuzzFeed said it was the most popular tweet of all time. "Karl Rove" trended when the Republican strategist argued that it was too early to call the election. Most of the tweets mocked Rove, who is an analyst for Fox News, which was among those reporting that Obama won. "Fox News is projecting that tomorrow is Wednesday, but Karl Rove refuses to believe it," tweeted a user called @doriginale5. After the call that Obama won, tweets with the hashtag "#election2012" reached more than 325,000 a minute, making it the most tweeted moment of the election, Twitter said. As much as the candidates, the other big hit on Tuesday was the "I voted" stickers voters received after casting their ballots. People posted photos of themselves with the stickers on their shirts, foreheads, children

and dogs. The phrase "ivoted" was popular with more than 1.4 million tweets as users posted more than 2,000 tweets per minute with the phrase or similar terms. On Instagram, the photo-sharing site owned by Facebook, people posted more than 775,000 photos with the term "vote," "ivoted" or some variation and more than 250,000 photos with the word "election" or similar phrase. The photos showed images of users' ballots and lines at their polling places. But some of that sharing may be illegal, depending on the state. Six states expressly prohibit recording inside a polling place, and 34 don't allow photos or filming of marked ballots, according to the Citizen Media Law Project. The research center at Harvard University posted guidelines for avoiding trouble with the law and a state-by-state guide on who allows filming and who doesn't. One video quickly went viral after a user called Centralpavote posted a video on YouTube that showed a malfunction with his voting machine. Every time his finger hit the button for Obama, a checkmark appeared next to Mitt Romney's name. The user said on YouTube that there has been speculation that the footage he shot was edited. "I'm not a video guy, but if it's possible to prove whether a video has been altered or not, I will GLADLY provide the raw footage to anyone who is willing to do so," he said. He went on to say the jumpy frames in the video are a result of a bad camera app on his smartphone. Matthew Keeler, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of State, confirmed that there was a problem with a voting machine in Perry County in the center of the state. "We received a complaint of a voting machine that was similar, if not identical, to the one seen in the video," he said. He said he thought it was the same machine, and it was recalibrated. The candidates themselves were using social media to get out the vote. The Obama campaign was particularly active, urging voters to stay in line to vote and calling out to residents in individual states. The Romney campaign was less active but urged voters to cast a ballot for the former governor. On Facebook, more than 2 million people were talking about Obama and more than 950,000 were talking about Romney. Among the top 10 terms on Facebook were "vote," "Obama," "Romney," "election" and "president." The social-media giant said 8.3 million people on Facebook said they voted. And there isn't a major media event without a series of Web-related mishaps or inaccurate information that spreads on social sites. The Cincinnati Enquirer on its website, Cincinnati.com, posted a front-page link to a chart with dummy data that showed early voting totals in Ohio counties. The data, created as a design template for election results, showed Romney in the lead. The link was tweeted by the Drudge Report, which wrote, "Early count in Ohio gives Romney 92,000 vote lead." The post was retweeted more than 1,390 times. The paper, which is owned by USA TODAY parent company Gannett, pulled the page, saying, "No votes have been counted yet by law, counting doesn't start until the polls close. Cincinnati.com regrets the error." The Associated Press called Michigan for Romney and quickly corrected it to say Obama won the state before the error hit social media, but not before The Wall Street Journal sent out an e-mail alert to its subscribers.

TechPresident: For Romney's Digital Campaign, A Second-Place Finish http://techpresident.com/news/23106/romneys-digital-campaign-second-place-finish By Nick Judd November 7, 2012 At every phase of the campaign, Mitt Romney's digital operation was half a step behind the technological savvy of Barack Obama's online team at several moments, announcing features or ideas hours, days or months after the Obama campaign had already rolled them out. After the primary election, Digital Director Zac Moffatt pointed out to me that the Romney campaign had not been operating with the breadth and depth of digital staff that Obama had at his disposal almost since day one. He argued at the time that digital communications were not in the budget for a Republican primary. "Are those roles essential in a primary as you move from state to state?" he asked me, back in May. In a September follow-up conversation, Moffatt described a digital operation that had been built up to comprise a core digital staff in Romney headquarters and a number of external vendors. The campaign used an external service, FLS Connect, to handle its phone banking by online volunteers. Another external service, Rally.org, handled Romney's online fundraising after it switched from a service, Fundly, that found its roots in Romney's 2007 Republican primary bid. The campaign passed a large amount of data into its own instance of Salesforce, a system used in business for tracking sales leads and other customer contacts. Meanwhile, Romney's opponents in Chicago largely hewed to a mix of systems built in-house this year mixed with systems built in-house in years previous. While outside vendors included Blue State Digital and NGP VAN, these companies were in essence extensions of the Democratic Party NGP VAN thanks to a longstanding arrangement with the national committee and Blue State because its leadership is packed with veterans of the Howard Dean campaign and Obama's 2008 election effort. Moffatt framed this choice as a mix of pragmatism in the face of a limited budget and a belief, he told me on various occasions, that the market had already surfaced the best tools for each job. The idea was to have the staff in-house for the general election to connect those services to one another. "What we're doing," he said in May, "is having more talented people to glue this together." As the campaign's digital operations ramped up, Moffatt's shop was beleaguered by a series of small losses. A campaign app misspelled "America" as "Amercia" just the first of several times when the digital team's grasp of the English language would be called into question. The Obama campaign consistently released features or products ahead of the Romney team, whether that was beating Romney by a matter of hours in announcing a Square app for in-person fundraising early in the year to a matter of months in announcing a "Quick Donate" feature that allowed donors who had already given once to send a repeat donation. Moffatt did advertise some digital successes. Romney's announcement that Paul Ryan would be his vice presidential nominee was supposed to come through a mobile application; while the campaign was beaten to the punch on the news, Moffatt says the announcement still drove two million unique visitors to the campaign's website, 40 percent of which came through mobile. The digital operation was integrated with the rest of the Romney campaign, Moffatt told me in September. As with other political campaigns this cycle, the Romney campaign maintained its own database of voters to attempt to find online. Using a data management platform, those voters were lumped into various audience segments the campaign attempted to track with advertising on the web something the campaign used both for persuasion and motivation, Moffatt told me.

"When an absentee ballot is dropping into a state, we have online ads that are chasing that, emails sent to the person, door knocks and phone calls, all coordinated into one holistic aligned digital slash political effort for turnout. There is no value in doing any of this online if you're not turning people out," he told me. In experimenting with the Romney version of "Quick Donate," called "Victory Wallet," the campaign also found that people who had donated once were at least three times more likely to donate again an example of how the campaign made adjustments over the course of the year to stay competitive. After the primary, Moffatt's operation shifted event management software in order to capture more information, like email addresses, from event attendees, collecting what he said were hundreds of thousands of new contacts. And as the campaign drew to a close, the Romney campaign followed the Obama campaign in implementing a Facebook application Romney's was called "Commit to Mitt" that looked through users' Facebook friends to identify voters in swing states. Supporters could then message their friends and urge them to get out and vote. While the application never worked for me, according to stats listed on Facebook, it had 31,000 users. The Obama campaign one-upped Team Romney here, as well: The Facebook friend-matching functionality came from a central Obama 2012 app, not a separate app. While both campaigns were able to send notifications to their users rather than rely on the news feed, where only a fraction of a Facebook page's audience actually sees a message unless the page owner pays a fee, Team Obama as a result could tug the sleeves of nearly one million Facebook users with a notification a dramatically greater reach. As the campaign wound down, Moffatt and his digital operation endured mounting criticism. Politico noted that the campaign had been outspent in online advertising and quoted Republican operatives as saying that Romney was leaving victories on the table for want of creativity. The Romney campaign was able to deploy all the same tools website, mobile apps, social media like Twitter and Facebook and even a comparatively little-frequented Tumblr, a graphics and design department, and highly targeted online advertising but was never able to point to an innovation that originated first in the Romney campaign and that yielded significant wins. On election night, Yahoo's Dylan Stableford wrote that the Romney campaign either in a final flourish of true class or a last digital embarrassment had aired Obama's victory speech on its own website prior to running Romney's concession remarks. The Romney campaign was every bit as interested in quantifying its successes or failures as Obama for America was, conducting surveys on panels of online ad-viewers to gauge the effectiveness of their ads, analyzing the results of fundraising asks and tweaking the subject lines that led their own barrages of email. As the Obama campaign celebrates, the defining conversation about the election's results will be the path to victory highlighted in Obama for America's data trail. The Romney campaign has its own statistics to analyze, even if the road through those numbers does not stop at the same destination. Slate: I Voted: Facebook Stories Shows Women Outvoting Women 2 to 1 http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/11/06/i_voted_facebook_stories_shows_women_outvotin g_men_2_to_1.html Will Oremus November 6, 2012 Women make up about 51 percent of the population and 53 percent of the electorate in U.S. presidential elections. But for some reason they are absolutely clobbering men when it comes to clicking on Facebook's "I voted" button today.

As I write this, some 3.6 million women have clicked on a special election-day prompt at the top of their newsfeed that encourages those who have voted to share the news with friends. That's nearly twice the number of men who have done the same. At last count, just 1.8 million men had clicked on the prompt, according to the real-time analytics on the "American Votes 2012" Facebook Stories page. Is this good news for Obama, who leads among women voters, according to polls? Or does it just mean that women spend more time on Facebook? Or that they're better at following instructions? Is this a product of residual enthusiasm for the Nineteenth Amendment, 92 years later? I contacted Facebook to see if they could offer any insight. They couldn't. Why are women clicking the "I Voted" button on Facebook so much more than men? WSJ: Election day plays out on Twitter and Facebook http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2012/11/06/election-day-plays-out-on-twitter-and-facebook/tab/print/ Shira Ovide November 6, 2012 For Election Daylike any big event these dayspeople took to Twitter Facebook and other social-media services to document their votes, grumble about long lines at the polls and make last-minute pitches for their favored candidates. After all, if you didnt relay your vote on Twitter, did the election actually happen? At about 3:30 p.m., Twitter reported that its users had posted about 1.4 million posts, or tweets, with the hashtag #ivoted or similar terms. Twitter said the pace of broader election-related tweets so far has reached a peak of about 15,000 tweets per minute at 2 p.m. Eastern Time. That compares with a top election-season peak until Tuesday of around 150,000 tweets per minute during the October presidential debate in Denver. Facebook posted an online counter showing more than 5.8 million people who posted their votes on Facebook. Expect social media to light up the further we get into Election Night. Indeed, in a report released Tuesday, the Pew Research Centers Internet & American Life Project said 22% of registered voters posted on a social-networking site about how they voted, and Pew found friends and family of 30% of registered voters have encouraged them to vote for one of the presidential candidates via posts on Facebook, Twitter or other social networks. To document the big day, people posted photos, tweets and posts from the ridiculous to the sublime. (Example of the former: A person in a Big Bird costume waited in line to vote.) Government officials and agencies, including New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg used social media to direct people to revised voting locations in areas where Sandy-related storm cleanup closed polling stations. Officials in Orange County, Calif., avidly posted on Twitter near-hourly voter counts, which were about half the levels of 2008, and relayed the challenge of retrieving election supplies from a car that had been impounded. Twitter also rolled out a map showing the mostly widely circulated tweets from President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney during the lead up to election day. For Mr. Obama, the highest level of engagementmeaning how many times Twitter users clicked on a tweet, replied to it or circulated it to other peoplewas a September tweet about making college affordable. For Mr. Romney, his most widely circulated tweet was a commemoration of the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Tech Crunch: Click Facebooks Im Voting button, research shows it boots turnout http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/06/click-facebooks-im-voting-button-research-shows-it-boosts-turnout/ Gregory Ferenstein November 6, 2012 Today, Facebook is encouraging its legions of users to declare civic enthusiasm to their friends, with a prominent Im A Voter botton at the top of the newsfeed. Large-scale, experimental research shows that simply clicking the button, and sharing your voting intention, could do more to increase voter turnout than any other partisan rant or news story you may share today. With a Single Message delivered electronically on Election Day, researcher James Fowler explained to TechCrunch, Facebook caused an extra third of a million people to vote. To put that number in context, remember that the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election was won by a margin of just 537 votes in Florida. Published in the prestigious journal, Nature, the 61-million person study displayed an I voted button atop the newsfeed of everyone over the age of 18, monitored whether voting intention was shared with others, and verified if the action had an impact on the user and their friends from official voting logs. Users were randomly assigned to see two versions of the I voted message, with one displaying pictures of their friends. Those who didnt see pictures were barely influenced, which raises doubts about the effectiveness of information-only appeals to vote in this context, question the authors. In the end, the message (with pictures) boosted turnout by a respectable 2.2 percent. Most importantly, 80 percent of the effect was indirect, caused by friends sharing the message. So, indeed, you can make a difference, and all it takes is a simple mouse click to spark a chain reaction of civic goodness. After users click the Im Voting button, they get access to a realtime heat map of voting around the country (pictured below): POLITICO: Study: Facebook, Twitter Users Divulge Votes Online http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83418.html#.UJl7Aps5mCM.twitter Alex Byers November 6, 2012 If your Facebook feed is becoming increasingly political, youre not alone. Nearly a quarter of registered voters told their Facebook friends and Twitter followers in the last month who they were planning to vote for on Election Day, according to a study out Tuesday from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Even more 30 percent said friends and family had used social media to encourage them to vote for President Barack Obama or Republican candidate Mitt Romney. This is the first cycle in which Pew has conducted such a poll, so the research organization doesnt have previous data with which to compare it. But theres no question that these figures would dwarf social media usage in the 2010 and 2008 cycles, said Lee Rainie, the projects director. More people are on Facebook and Twitter, more people are using them and building them into the rhythms of their lives every day, he said. Its safe to say that this was a much smaller number even in 2010 and certainly in 2008. Twenty percent of voters said they had encouraged others to vote by posting on a social network site, the study found. Thats significantly more than the percentage of respondents who urged others to vote via text message (10 percent) or email (12 percent).

National polls heading into Election Day have the race effectively tied, and the 2012 presidential race has been remarkably bitter and divisive. Neither side, however, seems to have much of an advantage in terms of organic and digital get-out-the-vote efforts, the study found. Younger voters, though, were much more likely to suggest on social media that friends and followers should vote for their candidate of choice, according to the report. An increase in social media users getting vocal about politics may be subject to somewhat of a snowball effect, Rainie said. Once they see it as sort of a common practice in their network, at some point it becomes something that they are feeling embarrassed not to share, he said. It becomes a network expectation. The increased political chatter on social media may simply be a new manifestation of previous political habits in offline social networks. Political water-cooler talk is just shifting to the Internet, Rainie said. Networked life is sharing life, for better or for worse, Rainie said. The way that you form your identity in social networks, the way that you find others that share your views, the way that you build trust with your friends is to disclose more and more. The study was conducted between Nov. 1 and Nov. 4 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.6 percentage points. Naked Security: US Election Voting Booth Hoax Spreads on Facebook http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/11/06/election-voting-booth-hoax/ Graham Culey November 6, 2012 Facebook users are mistakenly sharing a warning with each other about how to behave in voting booths during today's elections for the American presidency. Here's a typical message: Another version reads: "PLEASE PAY CAREFUL ATTENTION TO THIS!!! In the event that you are planning to vote democrat on Nov. 6, when you go into the voting booths, DO NOT SELECT THE BUTTON "all democrats" first, because Barack Obama will be excluded from the vote. However, if we choose "Barack Obama" first, and then "all democrats", he will earn our votes. People are not being told this information, because they are trying to use every trick in the book. TELL EVERYBODY YOU KNOW THIS! PLEASE FORWARD to as many people as possible even!!" According to reports, the warning is not only confusing and alarmist - but could lead to some voters getting muddled and not voting for their preferred candidate. I don't have any first hand experience as I'm not an American citizen, but I'm told that in some states choosing the party first on a voting machine, can lead to all of the candidates of your preferred political party being chosen - including the presidential candiate.

That could mean if you get confused and subsequently make a presidential selection for a second time, you could uncheck your vote for the president. My advice? Review your choices closely before you press the final button in the voting booth. Things were so much easier with a paper ballot.. Stay informed about the latest security and privacy issues related to Facebook. Join the Naked Security page on Facebook, where over 190,000 people regularly share information on threats and discuss the latest security news. The Atlantic: Obamas Facebook Fans Love Michelle; Romneys Love Winning http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/obamas-facebook-fans-love-michelle-romneyslove-winning/264554/ Rebecca Rosen November 5, 2012 The top-line Facebook numbers look pretty good for Barack Obama: nearly 32 million likes compared with 12 million for Mitt Romney. Of course, Facebook "likes" don't equal votes, and with a younger base of support you'd expect to see more Facebook activity for Obama, so that gap may not tell us all that much about this race. But dig a little deeper into the Facebook data and two very different pictures emerge of who these 32 million and 12 million are, and what it is about their candidate-of-choice that speaks to them. This is the conclusion of some pretty wonderful data scraping and analysis by Deen Freelon, a professor at American University. Freelon captured all of the likes, comments, and shares on Obama and Romney's Facebook pages between April 25 (the day the RNC officially endorsed Romney) and November 2. He then looked in the data for the posts that received the most likes/shares/comments, searching for the types of content that most resonated with supporters. He found that Obama supporters tended to go wild for (as measured by "likes") anything sentimental about the president's family, while Romney fans were more focused on the campaign itself -- "liking" posts that trumpeted its strength. For comparison, here are two charts Freelon created that show spikes in "likes" since April, with each spike appearing underneath the text that garnered the approval. Photographs across the top of the chart accompanied the posts. "The first thing that jumped out at me here was how none of the top five most-liked posts had anything to do with politics -- they were scenes from the Obamas' family life, the kinds of moments that could be found in any American family photo album," Freelon writes. "The wholesome sentiments these shots convey couldn't be farther from the knock-down drag-out negativity flooding the airwaves and the Internet throughout the timeframe, which may explain why they were so popular among Obama fans." (The fifth image didn't fit in the chart, but Freelon says the text of that one did the best job of speaking for itself. For the curious, the image that accompanied that post can be found here.) As you can see, the top "liked" posts for the Romney campaign were all calls to help push them over some benchmark. "Romney's fans seem to be more goal-oriented than Obama's: rather than reveling in idyllic family scenes, they were most interested in showing off their support for Romney to their Facebook friends," Freelon writes. One explanation for this may be that because the Romney campaign has so many fewer fans,

its Facebook base is made up of more hardcore supporters, while the 32 million Obama Facebook fans includes a broader swath of people, such as those who just generally feel positively about Obama, but who aren't as into the horse-race politics of campaign season. Overall, posts on the Obama page had much higher median "likes" (111,231 compared with 64,182), shares (11,753 compared with 3,644), and comments (7,309 compared 4,376) than Romney's page, though Romney's peaks were far higher. The Romney campaign also posted much more frequently -- about twice as often -- so Romney's "like" totals are higher: (58.5 million compared with to 42.7 million), according to Freelon's calculations. Freelon warns that it's important to bear in mind that these data "say much more about each campaign's supporters than they do about the candidates." Both campaigns posted about their families; both campaigns asked supporters to "like" and share content. The difference is in what resonated. For Romney, the enthusiasm seems to be more about winning, whereas for Obama there seems to be genuine enthusiasm for him as a person. That conclusion may directly capture only the activities of the campaigns' many fans, but of course they do in turn reflect something about the candidates -- and the positions they're in -- going into tomorrow. Technology Review: How Facebooks Plans Could Affect the Election http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506496/how-facebooks-plans-could-affect-the-election/ David Talbot November 2, 2012 Repeating an effort that in past elections has boosted real-world voter turnout, Facebook is expected to announce Monday that it plans to post get-out-the-vote messages to the tens of millions of voting-age Americans likely to log in to the site this coming Election Day. This follows the groundbreaking finding, published in the journal Nature two months ago, that a particular type of message posted on Election Day in 2010 boosted actual turnout by at least 340,000 votes (see How Facebook Drove Voters to the Polls). James Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, who participated in the 2010 study, says that this coming Election Day, he expects more people to log in to Facebookand thus see any messages that encourage votingthan did two years ago. Last time, 61 million people logged in, he says, referring to U.S. Facebook account holders of voting age. He says his high-end estimate for Tuesday would be about 100 million users. However, any ensuing boost to real-world voting might actually be smaller than it was in 2010, because this is a presidential election year, when larger fractions of voters are already committed to going to the polls anyway. In addition, this year more voters are voting early than in previous elections. Facebook has experienced rapid worldwide growth in recent years, from 100 million monthly active users in August 2008 to a billion in October of this year. However, the growth of the U.S. component has slowed sharply. Current U.S. membership is about 160 million, up slightly from last year. Increased voter turnout tends to favor Democratic candidates. Nationally there are far more registered Democrats than Republicans72 million to 55 million. About 42 million are registered as Independent. However, those involved with the Facebook push say theres no evidence that their effort would favor one presidential candidate over the other.

Facebooks own get-out-the-vote drive, of course, will be just one of the myriad appeals expected to appear on the site on Election Day. Both President Obama and Mitt Romney are expected to furiously campaign to get their known supporters to voteand to encourage voting. The Obama campaign, for example, has put out messages to people who have downloaded the presidents Facebook campaign app, saying Early voting is here. Tell your friends! Anyone who did download Obamas app also gave permission for the app to see his or her friends listas well as the locations and ages of those friendsso the list likely consists of possible supporters in swing states (see Facebook: The Real Presidential Swing State). Clicking the message brings up a list of friends who might be interested in knowing this. Fowler, who received such a message, described it this way: It looked like they were weighting friends in competitive states and by how close they were to you. In Facebooks 2010 get-out-the-vote effort, the company posted special reminders that said: Today is Election Day. These messages included a button to click to indicate if youve voted. The paper in Nature reported that when these reminders included face pictures of friends who had voted, it drove an additional 340,000 voters to polls, based on voting records that the researchers had access to. Beyond seeing posts that encourage voting, Facebook account holders (and Internet users generally) will see a barrage of last-minute online ads, as campaigns continue until the last penny is spent or the polls close, says J.D. Schlough, a political strategist. The worst thing that can happen for a campaign manager is to end a campaign with money in the bank, and lose, he says. Obligingly, Google and Facebook and other ad networks are providing a dizzying array of advertising tools and strategies, including ones that track people by their behaviors and interests. Another way the campaigns target voters online is by hiring companies like Audience Partners, which matches real-world voter records with their computer addresses, allowing targeted ads (see Campaigns to Track Voters With Political Cookies). Boston.com: Some Facebook Users Dislike Being Used in Online Advertising for Mitt Romney http://www.boston.com/politicalintelligence/2012/11/01/some-facebook-users-dislike-being-used-onlineadvertising-for-mitt-romney/4HAxE8p7s9vlrnDgufqW9J/story.html Bobby Caina Calvan November 1, 2012 WASHINGTON -- Visit Mitt Romneys page on Facebook and youll see 11.6 million likes. Lee Wolf, a selfdescribed liberal who likes nothing about Romneys politics, was stunned to hear from friends on the online social network that his name had popped up as an apparent supporter of the Republican presidential candidate. I dont believe in anything he says. Hes not somebody Id be voting for, said Wolf, who owns the Lobster Shanty, a restaurant in downtown Salem. Im still wondering how it happened. Others are wondering, too. This happened to me!! I keep unliking the Mitt Romney, but his posts keep coming back!! So frustrating!! Go Obama!!! wrote a Facebook user named Sabeen Shamsi, one of 676 people who liked a new Facebook

page dubbed Hacked by Mitt Romney created last month to denounce how their accounts are being signed up for Mitt Romneys page without the owners permission. The culprit was unclear. A Romney spokesperson declined to comment publicly, and a spokeswoman for Facebook said she could not immediately explain any apparent glitches but said the company would look into the matter. I dont think Mitt Romney is sitting at his keyboard doing this, said Mark Turner, a computer systems administrator in Raleigh, N.C.. who set up the hacked by Romney page. He suspects its a Facebook software issue. Still, Turner said it was upsetting, because theyre putting words in my mouth. With 60 percent of all American adults connected via social media portals such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, online communities have become an important part of the political process, according to the Pew Research Center. Indeed, 39 percent of all American adults have taken some kind of civic or political action using social networks, such as encouraging friends to vote or advocating a political position, said Aaron Smith, a Pew researcher. Recommendations from people they know or people like them can be more powerful than people they dont know, Smith said. Its understandable, he said, why some would be upset that theyre being portrayed as having beliefs they do not hold. Imagine, he said, if an Obama yard sign suddenly appeared on the front lawn of a Romney supporter. What appears on peoples social networking sites is a self-curated picture of who they are, Smith said. Pat Gauen, a columnist with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was also surprised to be informed that he had liked Romney. This is my first presidential election as a member of Facebook, which I joined for kinship with family and friends and now find overrun with moronic political rants. I never comment there on anything except for occasional innocuous messages to those I hold close, he wrote in August. Was I the victim of sabotage (like the time one of our kids swiped about 100 campaign signs and posted them all in our front yard)? Or the victim of my own keyboard clumsiness? Gauen posted a disclaimer and unliked Romneys page -- with the caveat, he said, that doing so was not the same as dislike, for which there is no option, nor would I want to say that anyway. Kristine Faxon, the executive director of a Savannah, Ga., arts college, thought she was hacked last month when she saw Mitt Romney among her likes. Im a huge Obama supporter, she said. She thought her dad, a Romney supporter, had played a trick on her. But he insisted he had nothing to do with it.

My friends thought I did a complete 180, said Faxon, who moved to Georgia from New York City in July. Wolf isnt quite sure how he came to like Mitt Romney. If the date stamp on his Facebook account is to be believed, it happened at 2:15 a.m. on July 17. On the early morning of July 16, he also liked the rapper Jay Z, car racer Danica Patrick, and Grey Goose Vodka. Its highly unlikely that I pressed like on any of these things, he insisted. Wolf said a friend alerted him that something was amiss. It concerned me enough to put a message out, he said. I dont want to give friends the wrong impression, that somehow I actually agree with the things he stands for. At first, Wolf thought it was a glitch. But on Thursday, he saw with his own eyes that buried in his list of 470 likes was Romneys smiling mug. Now that I know its actually there, he said in a telephone interview, Ill unlike it as soon as we hang up. Forbes: Why do Obama Supporters Appear in Facebook Ads as Romney Fans? http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2012/10/31/why-do-obama-supporters-appear-in-facebook-ads-asromney-fans/ Robert Hof October 31, 2012 Ive been seeing a Sponsored Story ad on Facebook pages lately that indicates several friends like Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. No surprise there. Sponsored Stories are those personalized ads the social network allows advertisers to run that show friends have liked a brand, and theyre increasingly common as Facebook doubles down on social advertising. But what on Earth was the name of a friend, who I know is a vocal Obama supporter, doing on a Romney ad? The answer raises questions about how effective, or at least how accurate, these ads arenot necessarily due to a particular fault by Facebook but thanks to the byzantine rules and privacy features that have developed over years of user outrage and resulting Facebook accommodations. Anyway, I asked my friend if he knew he was shilling for Romney. His response: Lol..I liked him so I could see his FB feed. You should read my comments. [Hint: They're not complimentary.] To be clear, you can see Romneys posts on his page without liking him, but to see them in your own news feed, you need to like him. And once you do, like it or not, you become potential fodder for an ad that will appear to your friends. Another friend of a friend whos an Obama supporter also was surprised to see his name on a Romney ad. He told his friend: I never liked his page. I commented on one of their crazy lies.. gave them a serious piece of my mind ya know!!!!! All kinds of people have been telling me why do u like Mitt???? Im pissed!!!

However, Facebook says that a mere comment on a page, by itself, will not result in showing that a person likes a brand or person. Nor do you have to like Romney simply to comment on one of his posts. An anecdotal search of a dozen people who commented on Romney posts wasnt conclusive, though it left me thinking its most likely that people either inadvertently liked him or, like my Obama supporter friend, did so purposely to get his posts into their feeds. (Because Im not a conspiracy theorist, Im assuming for now that Romneys campaign isnt randomly using non-fans names in these ads, which would be crazy.) Update: After getting a comment from the person running the Facebook page Hacked by Mitt Romney, and looking at the comments on that page, its clear that a lot of people believe there is skulduggery by the Romney campaign. However, it still seems most likely that many people dont realize that simply clicking on a Romney Sponsored Story, especially on a mobile device, can result in a like for Romney. Some apparent Obama supporters, judging from the content of their comments, were not shown on their Facebook pages as liking Romney. However, one Obama fan was shown as liking Romneyin that case, the list of likes showed both Romney and the Democratic Party. Go figure. Its unclear how common such situations are. I suspect the meaning of like is clear enough that its not a widespread problem when it comes to political candidatesthough it seems to happen more often than you might think. But even a few head-scratching ads may raise questions among consumers about how meaningful a friends presumed recommendation is on Facebooks signature ads. Or they may feed into persistent worries about how private various interactions on Facebook should be. Writes another Facebook friend, though obviously in jest: I liked Buster Poseys catchers mitt. Did that do it? $%^&* advertising algorithms. At least one friend, a Romney backer, isnt particularly happy about being used in an ad, either. She voted for Obama last time, subsequently becoming frustrated with Obamas belief in big government. She had liked Romney not to show support but simply, again, to see his pages posts in her news feed. She says she didnt realize that could land her in a Romney ad and expressed some dismay: I dont think its good that they are using my name without being more upfront about doing it. One remedy is easy: You can unlike whatever youve liked with the click of a button, though Im not sure how quickly that action would trickle into the ad system. One of my friends suggested, instead, that in addition to a like button, there should be a shred button. Barring that unlikely feature addition, heres how to opt out of appearing in social ads, Romneys or anyone elses: Go to Privacy Settings at the very top right of your page, then to the Ads, Apps, and Websites Edit Settings link, then to Ads. Set your social ads and third-party ad settings to show your actions to No one. BuzzFeed: Facebook Lets People Talk Politics, But May Not Get Out the Vote http://www.buzzfeed.com/annanorth/facebook-lets-people-talk-politics-but-may-not-ge Anna North October 31, 2012

The extent to which social media actually influences the political landscape has been hotly debated in recent years. Now communications scholars have found that while looking at campaign websites seems to increase people's sense that they can influence politics, blogging and sharing on Facebook don't. Communications scholars Yushu Zhou and Bruce Pinkleton surveyed over 400 undergraduates at Washington State University about how much attention they paid to a variety of media sources including conventional (ie print or television) media, campaign and government websites, blogs, microblogging services like Twitter, social networks like Facebook. They also surveyed how interested and involved the students were in politics, as well as their feelings of "political efficacy," asking them how much they agreed with statements like "My vote makes a difference" and "I have a real say in what the government does." And they measured students' own online political expression how much they wrote political blog posts or shared political stories on social networks, for instance. They found that students who were already involved in politics were more likely to pay attention to media, both conventional and online. And students who paid attention to conventional media or to campaign or government websites were more likely to feel that their votes mattered. However, opinion blogs and social networks didn't seem to influence their feelings of efficacy. Interestingly, neither did expression students who shared their views online weren't necessarily confident that those views had a real influence on government. The study authors say this might be because people who spend a lot of time online "have less confidence in the political system and conventional media coverage." They didn't look at actual voting specifically, but their findings suggest there might be a lot of people talking about politics online without actually voting. Pinkleton, a communications professor at Washington State University, says that for people who are already politically engaged, social and other online media present a huge opportunity, not just to get information but also to create a community of like-minded people. But it's not necessarily going to make people who aren't already interested in politics automatically interested. Critics of online media have long resisted the notion that they can produce real social change. And Pinkleton casts Facebook and other online sources of information as more of a tool for people who are already active than a producer of activism in its own right: "it's a lot easier to organize on Facebook, but at the end of the day you still need people who are motivated, and the Internet's not going to change that." He added that he's "not convinced that internet has produced the revolution people predicted." That said, Pinkleton does note that the internet provides opportunities for campaigns that never existed before. Online media may be a particularly good way for a candidate to interact with his or her base, since politically engaged people are definitely engaging online. While his study didn't address party affiliation, he thinks the Obama campaign may have the edge in terms of using online media to mobilize voters, because of Obama's popularity with and outreach to young people. But of course, the Internet isn't just for the young Pinkleton notes that "a lot of the old divisions of internet use are falling away" as older people and those with less education get online (though high school dropouts still do so in smaller numbers). "From the candidate's perspective," he says, "it's smart to be out there" engaging with potential voters on Facebook and the web. But neither campaigns nor researchers have quite figured out yet how to translate online attention into actual votes. Tech Crunch: The Prop 37 Phenomenon on Facebook http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/28/the-best-ad-campaign-on-the-web/

Ali Partovi October 28, 2012 Editors note: Ali Partovi is an Internet entrepreneur (LinkExchange, iLike) and investor (Dropbox, OPower, Zappos). In recent years he has turned his attention to opportunities in food and agriculture. Over the past two weeks, Ive been involved in a Facebook ad campaign whose results are astonishing. Its a political campaign supporting Californias Proposition 37 (Label Genetically Engineered Foods). Our Facebook sales rep was ecstatic when she first saw the numbers. Shed never seen anything like it in her career. But before I share the details, let me explain why Im passionate about this. Level Playing Field Since 1995, the web has been heralded as the great leveler. When I was 23, I joined the founding team of LinkExchange, a startup trying to level the playing field for websites that wanted traffic. (LinkExchange, the webs first ad network, coined the acronym CTR for Click-Through Ratio more on that in a bit). Some years after LinkExchange was acquired, I ran GarageBand.com, a startup trying to level the playing field for indie bands. Throughout my career, Ive been drawn by the webs potential to help the little guy and democratize industries. Today AirBnB is disrupting hospitality; 99Designs the design business; Uber the taxi and limousine business; the list goes on. The Internet is also democratizing democracy. Fifteen years ago, political fundraisers were lavish events for the wealthy. Then we saw the rise of $25 donations via the web. Now, as social media replace traditional media, the influence of ordinary people may replace the influence of money. Facebook, including a new feature introduced last week, may change the fate of the Prop 37 vote on Nov 6, and with it herald a new face of politics in America. Transparency In The Food System Prop 37 is a proposed California law that would mandate the labeling of foods with genetically engineered ingredients, and bar marketing them as natural. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are experimental life forms invented by splicing DNA from different species: for example, salmon spliced with eel. These invented beings are patented on the basis that theyre unlike anything ever seen in nature; yet theyre labeled natural and theyve quietly invaded Americas food system over the past two decades. Are GMO foods safe? We dont know, but thats not the question: the law is not for a warning label. Do GMOs improve crop yields? Not yet, but thats not the question either. Will GMOs help feed the world? U.N. scientists say no, but nobodys asking California voters to decide how the world is fed. In America, we believe free markets should make decisions like that. Free markets are based on transparency and information, not government intervention. In some other country, say China, one might imagine a government secretly introducing experimental life forms into the food system in the name of increasing output. But in fact, China, along with Russia, India, Brazil, all of Europe 62 countries in total require labeling GMO foods. Its in America that theyve been covertly introduced.

The issue is not whether GMO foods are safe or productive. Its that theyre new and different; yet they look deceptively natural, and theyre deceptively labeled all natural. In America, we trust the labels. We dont expect our government to sneak new inventions into our food without telling us, no matter how wonderful they might be. Deception like this distorts prices, which particularly harms the poor. Low-income people care what they feed their kids too. When I was a teenager, my parents worked multiple jobs to pay for my education and put food on the table: healthy, natural food. Today, anybody buying all natural food is likely overpaying, unaware that it may contain genetically engineered ingredients. Most Americans react with alarm when they learn about GMOs, and the advocates of Prop 37 may come across as alarmist. (One renegade went so far as to make a homemade video featuring a mutant monkey and dead rats!) However, thats better than lying, which is what GMO companies are doing to confuse voters. $35 million from the likes of Monsanto has flooded California with misleading messages. Their ads feature a Stanford professor who is actually not a professor and not from Stanford; a fabricated FDA quote, forged seal and all; and so on. They decry Prop 37 as created by a trial lawyer, when it was actually started by a California farmer and mom (although she did get a lawyer to help with the, uh, law part). The Best Advertising One might think Californians would succumb to this drumbeat of deceptive corporate commercials. But heres where Facebook enters the picture. On Facebook, the voices of ordinary people speak louder than big corporations. On Facebook, the conversation may be messy and unpredictable, but the truth rises above the noise As every businessman knows, the best advertising is word of mouth. You cant buy that; but on Facebook, you can amplify it. Thats why, when I decided to help Prop 37, I focused on Facebook. The Prop 37 team had already cultivated a vibrant fan community on Facebook, which made all the difference. I helped start a promotion encouraging these fans to speak out for GMO labeling in their own words, and asking them to use the new Promoted Posts feature, where anybody can pay $7 to increase the visibility of what they say. Although some businesses on Facebook are complaining about paying to reach their own fans (here and here), we embraced this feature as a way of leveling the playing field for the little guy, and our fans have responded positively. I also began spending my own money and soliciting donations on Indiegogo to fund ads on Facebook. Ten days later, the results have been stunning. Is it the best ad campaign of all time? Possibly. Some of the ads have a CTR as high as 10%; on the whole they are 20 times better than average. They have a cost-per-click of $0.18, about five times better than average. With only $33,000, theyve reached 3.3 million Californians of voting age. The reach is more than doubled because people are clicking Like and forwarding the message along. Fueled by popular support, every dollar this campaign spends on Facebook has as much impact as ten dollars spent on TV ads. Whats more, the ads are literally the voices of ordinary people. Our most effective ad units are not clever slogans or graphics, but fan comments. The message is replete with typos and errors, but it has one thing the opposition lacks: authenticity.

What happens in California doesnt stay in California. Im passionate about Prop 37 because its impact goes beyond California, and beyond GMOs. The Prop 37 vote is a referendum on all food reform, from corn subsidies to antibiotics in meat. If it passes, it signals to Congress and the White House that food issues sway votes. If it fails, it signals business as usual: that the influence of agribusiness corporations is still greater than the voice of ordinary people. Prop 37 FTW! Mashable: Presidential Candidates Urge Voters to Get On Facebook http://mashable.com/2012/10/26/presidential-voters-facebook Neha Prakesh October 26, 2012 With less than two weeks until Election Day, both presidential candidates are making last ditch efforts to mobilize their constituencies -- to get on Facebook. Both President Obama and GOP contender Mitt Romney are hoping their supporters use their own social networks to lift momentum for their respective campaigns. The Romney-Ryan team sent emails today saying, "You can make a defining difference by doing something as simple as reminding your Facebook friends and family to get out and vote for Mitt Romney." Obama's team sent a similar email emphasizing that Facebook and online methods could help draw the needed support in swing states. "I know I can count on your vote, but you probably have some friends and family who need to be reminded how important their vote is," the email says. "Connect with friends and urge them to commit to vote." Both candidates also provide links to their Facebook apps within the emails (Commit to Vote and Commit to Mitt). The apps make it easy for voters to share with their friends and connections who they plan to vote for. More so, the emails make it evident that each campaign believes in the power of Facebook and social networks to translate an increased digital presence into a larger turnout at the polls. Will you be encouraging friends to vote on Facebook? Tell us in the comments below. Mashable: Super PAC Wants to Put You in Its Facebook Ad http://mashable.com/2012/10/25/super-pac-facebook-ad/ Alex Fitzpatrick October 25, 2012 The Ending Spending Action Fund, a conservative-leaning Super PAC advocating for the reduction of the federal debt, wants to cast a new star for its latest Facebook video advertisement: you. Called "The Ad About You," the ad is essentially a Facebook app that uses pictures you've posted to Facebook to customize an interactive video template.

When you install the app, it asks for your basic info, relationship status, your photos, photos shared with you and your customized friends lists -- everything it needs to customize the commercial. The app uses HTML5 and JavaScript to build the ad. The Ad About You is particularly effective at putting photos of your closest loved ones in the advertisement -when this writer demoed the app, it used almost entirely photos of himself and the person with whom he's listed as "In a Relationship" on Facebook. Contextually, the ad essentially asks if the viewer is better off under Barack Obama than he or she was before his presidency began. It ends with a shot of Mitt Romney and his wife Ann, with a caption reading "We can do better "The ad strategy is very basic," said Brian Baker, president of Ending Spending. "There are a number of undecided voters and we're trying to reach them in every way possible: print ads, tv ads and online ads. It's about real people talking to the neighbors, friends and family members about whom they're going to vote for this fall. "The folks that star in this ad are your friends, your family." When asked if he believed people would willingly allow Ending Spending to access their personal photos for use in a Super PAC video, Baker said he thought they would. "I'm quite confident people will click on it," he said. "It's an innovative idea, and if they like it they'll share it with friends and family." As of press time, approximately 6,180 people "liked" The Ad About You on Facebook. Ending Spending is financed mainly by Joe Ricketts, billionaire and founder of TD Ameritrade. It has spent $4.5 million on the 2012 presidential race, mostly on ads attacking President Obama, per The New York Times. Access The Ad About You right here. Would you give a Super PAC access to your Facebook photos to see them in an ad? POLITICO: Presidential Election 2012: Can Romney Close the Digital Divide? http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1012/82870.html Steve Friess October 25, 2012 BOSTON Mitt Romneys 120-member digital team has a seat in the Govs inner circle to push targeted ads on Facebook, Google and Twitter, to build mobile apps and to accept text-based donations, but even GOP operatives say they havent closed the digital divide with Barack Obamas tech machine. The Obama campaign has spent $47 million on online ads so far, compared to Romney's $4.7 million, according to election filings. The presidents mobile app lets volunteers get lists of homes in their neighborhood that need lawn signs and banners, while Romneys provides press releases and upcoming events. The Obama camp consistently scores digital firsts, such as geotargeting direct messages via Twitter this week. Within minutes of Obama's "horses and bayonets" zinger at the last debate, the campaign had posted video of it on YouTube.

Thus, as a tight race winds down and questions remain as to just how decisive a digital campaign is in the end, Romneys tech operation nonetheless is charged with helping turn momentum into votes. Its long been assumed that the digital advantage goes to the Obama campaign, which has spent more money, hired more tech staff and developed an in-house voter database thats rumored to be a game-changer in politics. Still, Romneys staff contends they have the right stuff. We put a heavy emphasis on making sure digital is doing what is necessary to win, Romneys online chief Zac Moffatt told POLITICO in a recent interview in the cavernous headquarters of the campaigns digital operations here. Our job is not to be the best digital team in the country; its to be the best digital team for the political team to be successful in November. Critics of the Romney campaigns tech efforts, including a number of Republicans, question whether Moffats crew has the speed and creativity to capitalize on important events online and convert positive messaging into votes. Case in point: Romneys big win on the night of the first debate. There was no mention whatsoever of the debate for days on the homepage, which is shocking, said Eric Frenchman, a key online consultant for John McCains 2008 presidential bid, after the debate in which Romney was said to have dominated. During the 2008 debates, the McCain campaign was blogging, creating ad spots and developed a microsite for Joe The Plumber overnight. After three debates, there is comparatively little on MittRomney.com, whereas BarackObama.com visitors were greeted with video clips and sound bites as if hed won them all. Romneys online efforts are more technologically sophisticated than the 2008 McCain campaign, but hardly what Moffatt claims is close to parity with the Obama folks, several top Republican digital strategists told POLITICO. They cant believe that, but if they do were in so much more trouble than I thought, said the online campaign director for a GOP Senate candidate in a swing state, who like many other Republican consultants declined to be quoted by name. We have our own operation, but its a presidential year, so theyre supposed to light the way. Its not a disaster, but its all so average and theyre going up against Mickey Mantle. The consensus from interviews with seven GOP online strategists and two swing-state Romney operatives is that the Romney team does everything Obama does, just not as well. Both sides have all the obvious tools mobile apps, social media accounts, email fundraising programs, online advertising strategies, rapidresponse teams, pretty graphics but the Romney camp lacks the speed and creativity to capitalize on important moments with technology. For his part, during a tour of the cavernous offices where more than 120 paid staffers do Romneys digital bidding, Moffatt exuded a brew of optimism and defensiveness, noting hes had about six months to try to match a monster apparatus built by the Obama team for its legendary 2008 campaign and never dissembled. McCain, he noted, had about a dozen online staffers and didnt include the digital director as senior staff.

Moffatt said hes on every strategy call and is integrated into all campaign efforts. Hes got a dozen staffers here creating region-specific Web banner ads, a gang there cutting video clips to post on YouTube. A Facebook envoy has taken up nearly full-time residence in Boston to help deploy the social networks latest tools which, at the moment, is a way to target ads just to the pages of individual registered swing-state voters who may be undecided. (A similar Facebook envoy advises Obama.) Moffatt said he cant compare his data to Obamas Anyone can make up numbers so he cites such favorable comparisons to the McCain effort. By the end of September, he said, the Romney campaign had knocked on more than 6 million doors in swing states versus 2.4 million for McCain through the entire race. The Romney team has made six times as many phone calls to voters than at this point in 2008 and a total of more than 30 million voter contacts, he said. "They're taking credit for that?" growled a Romney staffer in Florida. "That just insults everyone on the ground making calls and doing the walking. They may be spending lots of money on the Web, but maybe some of that could be better used down here where it's needed." Actually, the Romney camp is not spending that much and that might be one of the problems. FEC reports make it unclear how much each campaign spends on their overall digital efforts, but observers say the online advertising differential alone is telling. Obama is expected to dump as much as $100 million in Internet advertising by Nov. 6 and Romney was still shy of $5 million at the end of September. "Theres simply not a comparable level of financial commitment to digital when you look at Romneys campaign versus Obama's," said Peter Pasi, a veteran conservative direct marketer who has advised political candidates including Rick Santorum on digital fundraising and outreach. "The Romney digital team probably has to continually justify resources that Obama's people just get rubber-stamped. They are trying to hit all the marks but they are likely underfunded." Moffatt both defended his budget as generous and acknowledged the fact that the online team is under a microscope. "We have to constantly prove what we are doing, but once we do that, we get more resources," he said, noting that that's "a reflection of the Gov's viewpoint on the world." A short time later, asked how he proves that, he answered, "Digital is held to a different standard, and yet, we know every single time that the results are coming back to show that it does work. My bigger question to people on a campaign is, why don't the other parts of a campaign have to show whats going on?" Michael Turk, who was eCampaign Director for Bush-Cheney 2004, shrugged at the spending differential: The problem with Obama is that every time I open up my Facebook page, Ive got six Obama ads and Im never going to vote for the guy. At $47 million, theyre just using online advertising as a broadcast medium. There lies a core difference between the two efforts. Obama is reputed to have amassed a gigantic email and phone list the same FEC report showed Obama spending $363,000 on text messages alone this cycle, a line that doesn't exist on Romney's report and is probably accounted for under a different item. Obamas Twitter and Facebook audiences are also many times larger than Romneys. Obama has tried several new ways of reaching voters, from appearing on a Reddit live chat to inserting ads in video games. One of the stranger choices, critics say, was the Romney camp's decision to announce the selection of Paul Ryan as the vice presidential running mate via a smartphone app. The move was compared to Obamas

announcement of Joe Biden in 2008 via text message, and by all accounts more of those who signed up for Romneys notification received theirs in a timely fashion. But Romneys app did not require anyone to provide personal information such as email or text message, which many digital campaign strategists viewed as a failure. These guys seem to be not understanding how data collection technology works, said Scott Goodstein, owner of the online campaign firm Revolution Messaging and external online director for Obama's 2008 campaign. That is the clearest example of a missed an opportunity. You dont get the information from an app. Moffatt defended that decision by noting that most of those who downloaded the app agreed to receive push notifications, meaning messages from campaign sends to their phones. The hype around the VP app also drove downloads Moffatt claims their apps have been downloaded more than Obamas, although theres no independent way to verify that and the VP app was later converted into an overall RomneyRyan app. We thought it was more important for us that it was a different way for a distribution system, Moffatt countered. For us, it was an entry point for us to get as many people to download the app as possible. We needed some catalyst. The impression many outside the campaign have is that Obamas efforts are more dynamic and interactive, that Romneys messages on Facebook, Twitter and other outlets are banal and one-directional. Look at BarackObama.Com and you see it says Times limited, urgent, five weeks to go, 2012 debates, find a watch party, said Daniel Kreiss, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics From Howard Dean to Barack Obama. At MittRomney.Com, by contrast, Im asked to grab a bite with Paul Ryan. It could be any day on the campaign. Moffatt challenged that conventional wisdom, referencing a study released recently by the analytics firm Socialbakers that he said shows Romney enjoys more engagement by followers and fans than Obama despite the presidents bigger audiences and more frequent tweets and status updates. Yet several other studies, including one by Pew Research, view Obama as leading, reflecting how easy it is to spin these metrics. The Socialbakers study, for instance, also noted that Obamas tweet reacting to Clint Eastwoods empty-chair routine at the RNC enjoyed six times as many retweets as Romneys tweet announcing Ryan as his running mate. Moffatt does have his bonafides. A Stanford graduate, his first campaign was in 2001 New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, followed by key roles in the citys host committee for the 2004 Republican National Convention and President George W. Bushs successful re-election. He took on various roles for the national GOP and after the 2008 campaign he co-founded the GOP online campaign firm Targeted Victory. The firm handled digital strategy for Rubio among others. We have what we need to be successful in November, Moffatt said. They are so caught up in their vanity metrics; theyre so caught up in all of their Were smarter than everyone hubris. They are convinced that theyre smarter than the marketplace.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 5:24 a.m. on October 25, 2012. Tech President: Why Campaigns Are Happy Your Vote Isnt as Private as Many Think It Is http://techpresident.com/news/23032/do-you-care-if-obama-knows-you-voted-what-about-if-he-told-yourfriends Nick Judd October 22, 2012 The mailer that arrived in Ann Althouse's mailbox in June really creeped her out. "Why do so many people fail to vote?" it asked. "We've been talking about the problem for years, but it only seems to get worse. This year, we're taking a new approach. We're sending this mailing to you and your neighbors to publicize who does and does not vote." The mailer was the work of the Greater Wisconsin Political Fund, a progressive group hoping to drive turnout ahead of this summer's critical recall elections. On it was Althouse's name as well as those of several of her neighbors, along with whether they voted in the 2008 and 2010 general elections. Althouse, a conservative law professor and blogger, was shocked she called the practice "truly despicable," complaining that "your vote is private" and "this is an effort to shame and pressure people about voting" but by the time this strategy reached Wisconsin, it was already old hat. This tactic, called "social pressure" by some and "shaming" by others, is partly driving the latest round of hand-wringing over the data-driven, highly targeted political present. Rather than using commercial marketing data about voters, these strategies use public records and social connections to convince people to vote. There are shades of this in the tools now in play from both presidential campaigns. The latest round of fundraising emails from the Obama campaign includes messages that remind supporters of how much they have given to the campaign so far or calls them out for not giving anything. Another effort asks supporters who have signed in to the Obama for America Facebook app, thus sharing their friends lists with the campaign, to share a get-out-the-vote message with acquaintances in swing states. Mitt Romney's campaign just launched a similar tool. In a recent article in The New York Times, Charles Duhigg, author of a book that addresses targeted marketing, quotes an unnamed Democratic consultant wondering aloud if "this is the year to start shaming" but it seems the finger-wagging and elbow-nudging has already begun. These are just parts of an interconnected web of experiments, partly taking place through mailers, partly driving new technology-driven communication over social networks. These new initiatives play on the concept that what voters know about one another may turn out to be more important than what the campaigns themselves have on file. What they know, and when they knew it "There is some evidence, some recent evidence that suggests that voters are actually much less responsive to microtargeted or narrowly targeted messages than they are to more broad-based appeals," said Costas Panagopoulos, an associate professor of political science and director of the Center for Electoral Politics at Fordham University. On the other hand, he said, several studies suggest that voters respond strongly to being contacted with their own personal information.

"So for example when you disclose people's recent voting history to others, that's something that voters are very responsive to. And in the case of prior voting the academic literature has shown that voters are more likely to participate in elections when you disclose or threaten to disclose their electoral participation, presumably because voting is a social norm or a socially desirable activity and they don't want to be perceived as violating those norms." A landmark 2008 study led by Yale University professor Alan Gerber found so-called "social pressure" of this nature, threatening to out people to their neighbors as civic slackers, could increase voter turnout rates by upwards of eight percent more than a mailer that merely asked the recipient to go vote without mentioning personal information. As soon as the news got out that "social pressure" works, campaigns began testing the practice and academics continued to study it in the 2008 and 2010 election cycles. Panagopoulos says the rate at which people objected to being targeted like this in an academic study was relatively low. But when the Greater Wisconsin Political Fund gave this a shot, Althouse wasn't the only one to think it was a violation of privacy. Plenty of other people also objected to this use of voter data. Supporters of an effort to recall a Republican state senator derided the idea on a public Facebook thread and in the forums of Democratic Underground, a progressive online community, expressed the same discomfort with this use of personal information. The volume of protest became so great that on June 4, three days after Althouse received her copy of the mailer, the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board put out a press release pointing out that the voter rolls were public, the mailers were legal, and none of the blame could be placed at the feet of Wisconsin officials. This wasn't the only instance in which "voter shaming" generated more anger than embarrassment. In 2010, Senate candidate Mike Lee sent an email to supporters in Utah with an attachment that included the names and contact information of voters who had voted in presidential elections, but not midterms. These people, the email suggested, needed to be educated about the importance of midterm elections. The Daily Herald of Provo, Utah, quotes a local voter, Andy Gibbons, as calling the email "despicable." Panagopoulos, the Fordham associate professor, is an author of a study that experimented with what would happen if the message was less heavy-handed. Rather than trying to shame or pressure voters, his study focused on messages thanking people for voting in the past. While the results weren't as dramatic as messages that sought to motivate by fear, they still correlated with a notable rise in turnout. "Most people don't react with hostility," Panagopoulos said, "but some voters find it offensive, and I think these are the people who have concerns about how much information is publicly available about their political behavior." As Shane Hamlin, co-director of elections in Washington State, explains, how you vote is secret, and nobody is suggesting that it shouldn't be. But when you did or did not vote has always been a matter of public record. In June, labor groups used a tool called Amicus during the Wisconsin recall effort. Amicus users check their Facebook friends against a voter file, and come back with lists of their friends who a given campaign or political group believes might be persuaded to go out and vote. In an interview, Amicus co-founder Seth Bannon explained that this is motivated in part by the same "social pressure" theories that informed the Wisconsin mailers. He cited the Alan Gerber study by name. Another recent study also found that get-outthe-vote messages on Facebook, pressure or no, is correlated with higher turnout.

"In the old days a campaign or political party could send a poll watcher to the sites to see who voted and who didn't and take that information back to the headquarters and get on the phone to remind people to vote," Hamlin said. "That's the way it happened 10 years ago," Hamlin continued. "The availability of the Facebook aspect isn't really much different except that it's instant. I think it's still an important part of the democratic process. Voting is done in private and secret, but it's still a community experience." Personal Democracy Media is also involved in an initiative that puts this idea to use. Supported by the Ford Foundation, TechPresident's parent company is collaborating with the Internet freedom advocacy group Center for Rights on Vote with Friends. This tool shows you which of your friends appear in a database as being registered to vote and gives you the opportunity to nudge them towards voting. Like all voter records, the database isn't perfect for example, it tried and failed to find my own voter registration. "Big Brotherish" Inaccurate data is just one of many privacy concerns stirred up when it becomes obvious that voter registration information is being used to figure out who to target. After the historically close 2004 governor's race in Washington, the state legislature there made changes to election law in the hopes of making it less likely for a close race to be decided as much by rounding errors as on who cast a ballot. One of those changes included making each voter's date of birth available for public inspection, a change Hamlin, of the Washington Secretary of State, says his office fought against and lost. When Washington's Help America Vote Act-mandated statewide voter database went online, each voter's data of birth came online with it. "You get a statewide list from us for the first time in 2006 and then some bloggers, who were still convinced that the 2004 election didn't come out the way it should have, created searchable databases," Hamlin explained to me. "And then they were discovering all this information about themselves that was public that they did not know was public." That, he said, generated a lot of phone calls. What's happening now, he suggested, is similar: In an election year, people are confronted with more evidence that there's a difference between what they think is public about them and what actually is. Campaigns and researchers alike know that at least some people are unsettled by increasing access to information about voting history. Christopher Mann, an assistant professor at the University of Miami, conducted research that focused specifically on voter backlash. "You can deliver that same information of, 'we know,' but deliver it in a way that is less threatening and Big Brotherish," Mann said. "It can be delivered, in my research it was delivered in the sense of being helpful. 'We've seen that you don't vote in every election. Here are some resources to help you vote.'" But wrapping that "we know" message in the robes of academia is not always enough to cool people down. Also this summer, a Harvard University Ph.D student in economics and a researcher at Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina, led a study that sent mailers at random to people listed in the Federal Elections Commission database as donors who had given $200 or more. Those mailers listed each donor's contribution along with the contributions of a few of their neighbors, identified by first name and last initial. The Chronicle of Higher Education quotes Orlando, Fla. resident Susan Kelley, who received a mailer:

While I am well aware that the information is public, as is a great deal of other information about each of us, I was offended that Harvard University would feel it was in the interests of research to urge people to view each others political contributions, she writes in an e-mail. I am no more interested in the contributions of my neighbors to their favorite politicians than I am in how they vote. When contacted by email, the researcher on the Harvard project, Perez Truglia, declined to go into details about his study, saying data analysis was not yet complete. "One of our aims is to study the implications of the publics awareness about the open nature of campaign contributions," he wrote in an email. "We hope that the research will shed light on the advantages and disadvantages of different disclosure policies, which we believe is a very important issue." A more open future? For people like Seth Bannon, Amicus' founder, a future where everyone's political cards are on the table is inevitable. Bannon, like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, advocates for transparency as a social force while at the same time the success of his business depends on it. Nonetheless, that's the future he sees: One where people know and accept that attendance is taken in the public square and their friends are keeping track. "We're definitely moving towards a world where my friends will know whether I voted in the last election or not and they're going to let me hear about it if I didn't," Bannon said. "I think public perception hasn't caught up to the technology yet, but it quickly is." Some voters, like the Wisconsin law professor Ann Althouse, say that not voting is a legitimate choice. It's as much a way to participate as voting, and people shouldn't be publicly called out for deciding not to vote. Bannon is not one of those people. "I think that voting is a civic responsibility as citizens," he said, "and you're not going to change the process by not participating in it." Just more noise on the channel Political campaigns know that this type of contact can be disconcerting, said Mann, the University of Miami professor who did research on the backlash potential of social pressure to vote. They also know that studies indicate it can help them win. What isn't clear is if any kind of communications targeted advertising, overt pressure using personal information, anything can cut through the intense amount of noise directed at voters in key states like Ohio. "I talk to a lot of campaign professionals," Mann told me. "What's interesting is there was some reluctance to at first use any social pressure and then they got comfortable using some sort of social pressure. And as the stakes go up, campaigns start to think more about using tactics they might not otherwise." "Maybe they thought that doing shaming might have felt over the top or inappropriate in a past election but now it feels justified," he said later on in our conversation. "What's not clear to me is if it's going to make a difference given all the other things that are out there."

Ohio is awash in advertising money from the campaigns and outside groups. The state has already been open for early voting for two weeks, and has another two weeks left to go. The Romney and Obama campaigns are treating every day in Ohio like it's election day, Mann said. That barrage is making Ohioans tune out. "Unrelated to social pressure, I'm conducting experiments in battlefield states," Mann said. "You can't get people to answer the phone in Ohio." That's where these emerging experiments at the margins, focused on person-to-person contact, begin to make sense. The Obama campaign, for instance, has in recent days been sending emails to supporters asking them to contact friends in battleground states with early voting. Obama supporters who have signed in to the Obama for America Facebook app have shared their friends list with the campaign. Some of them are getting emails asking them to share Facebook messages with friends in states like Ohio and Nevada that have the potential to decide the entire election. The Romney campaign has also launched an app that rifles through users' Facebook friends and highlights potential voters to contact on the campaign's behalf. Neither of those appear to include a Big-Brother style message about following up to tell everyone if the voter cast a ballot, but they do ask supporters to reach out based on things the campaigns know about those supporters' friends, like where they live. "The logic behind this is the impact of these messages will be stronger from their friends," Mann said. "That's from psychology. There's a common-sense piece here that a big challenge for campaigns in this electoral environment is delivering a message that they pay attention to. It isn't the fourth phone call they receive in a night, it isn't another piece in a stack of mail." Both presidential campaigns now seem to be trying to find a path to victory that plays on this combination of available information, available connections, and social pressure, but does so in a way that is subtle enough not to piss anyone off. I asked Ann Althouse, the Wisconsin law professor who protested against getting that overtly threatening mailer from the Greater Wisconsin Political Fund, about the argument that a voter's history is open and voting is a civic duty. I also pointed out to her that new tools allowed campaigns to identify the likeliest voters from among a supporter's Facebook friends and give that supporter ideas about how to gently nudge them towards the ballot box. It's one thing to keep track of who voted to make sure an election is fair and the tally is accurate, she said, and quite another to use it for a political purpose. "I'm aware of the research that says this social pressure works," Althouse wrote to me in an email, "but if using it subjects you to condemnation, it can backfire. I hope it backfires. I think it's creepy, ugly, and embarrassing for the candidate who stoops to this method. I feel the same way about playing on racial fears. You're free to do that, and you might sway some votes that way, there will be a backlash of condemnation that makes it a net loss." What about friends who reach out on Facebook, I asked, or make a phone call, that's obviously informed by a campaign's hope that it will pressure her to vote? "If such a call went through at my house, the caller -- if it was someone I knew so I answered the phone -would get a piece of my mind," she wrote, "and would not get off the phone with me until he exhibited shame and apologized for calling." This post has been updated. Charles Duhigg's book, "The Power of Habit," is focused on studies of behavior and how they are applied to business, not only targeted marketing.

This post has been corrected to give Shane Hamlin's proper title. He is co-director of elections, not assistant secretary of state. This post has been corrected to properly explain mailers sent out this summer with donor information. They included donors' first names and last initials, not first initial and last name. SFGate: Social Media Battle: Obama Engages More Voters Despite Aggressive Romney Debate Strategy http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2012/10/23/social-media-battle-obama-engages-more-votersdespite-aggressive-romney-debate-strategy/ Jana Kasperka October 22, 2012 The pundits have declared Barack Obama to be the winner of last nights third and final presidential debate of the 2012 general election. The big loser? Its not Mitt Romney. The loser in the bid for buzz was social media itself. Twitter and Facebook, the prime sources of instant commentary on the presidential campaign, rung up lower numbers than the record-breaking response to the first debate. Call it debate fatigue or social media overkill. Besides the spike in activity over Obamas fewer horses and bayonets comment, Twitter came 4 million tweets short last night of breaking the record set by the first presidential debate. Despite the social media slump, both campaigns were able to enlist new followers on various social media platforms. And who was the winner? Even though Republicans clearly approached social media with a specific strategy in mind, Obamas team was once again able to engage more users throughout the night. How it all played out: Breakdown of mentions was provided by U.S. Politics on Facebook (www.facebook.com/uspolitics) and @gov on Twitter (www.twitter.com/@gov). (Jana Kasperkevic/Hearst Newspapers) This might have been a foreign policy debate, but the conversation often strayed to other topics as well, including economy (20 percent), taxes (7 percent), and energy and environment (4 percent). Engagement: Just as in the last debate, Obamas campaign out-tweeted Romneys. @BarackObama Twitter account was actively tweeting and re-tweeting during the debate, even re-tweeting non campaign accounts such as @ThinkProgress and @EdHenryTV.

While @RomneyResponse did tweet quite frequently during the debate, @TruthTeam2012 not only tweeted more but also engaged more users by also re-tweeting non campaign affiliated accounts such as @TheFix and @JeffreyGoldberg. Both campaigns also utilized Twitter to solicit donations by sending out the following tweets: Prior to the debate, both campaigns posted engaging messages accompanied by colorful graphics on their Facebook pages. Romneys graphic received more likes, 183,979 to Obamas 139,931, but it only got half of the shares and comments that Obamas graphic did. Considering, that Romney only has one third of the followers on Facebook that Obama has, one could say that they were equally successful in engaging Facebook users. However, Obamas campaign also shared the following graphic on Twitter and on Facebook. The campaign engaged the Facebook users by specifically asking them to Share the post and within 34 minutes, the graphic was shared 19,743 times. The tweet containing the graphic did not include any instructions for engagement and consequently, over the span of nine hours, the graphic was only re-tweeted 7,458 times. Obamas campaign asked their followers and supporters to share the image above if they thought that President Obama had won the third and last presidential debate. (Jana Kasperkevic/Houston Chronicle) The Last Presidential Debate in Trends: P Republicans went into this debate prepared to dominate the social media. While Romney for President Inc. splurged for a promoted trend of #CantAfford4more, organizations such End Spending Action Fund and American CrossRoads paid for promoted pro-Romney/Ryan tweets, which appear on various searches for both Obama and Romney. YouTube, which was streaming the debate, also paid to promote tweets on such searches. The day of the third presidential debate, #CantAfford4More was the promoted trend both worldwide and in the U.S. (Jana Kasperkevic / Houston Chronicle) Stop the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) organization had its own plans for last nights debate to Twitter bomb it with hash tag StopNDAA. #StopNDAA did in fact trend in Texas early on and later even became a nationwide as well as worldwide Twitter trend. The Twitterverse might have been suffering from debate fatigue during this third and final presidential debate, considering that the amount of tweets sent out during the debate only reached 6.5 million, down from 7.2 million during the second debate and 10.3 million during the first debate. However, as always there were number of peak moments during the debate, with Obamas fewer horses and bayonets and Shieffers I think we all love teachers comments. Romneys campaign might have paid to have a promoted trend, but Obamas zingers such as his response that Romney is attempting to airbrush history and his fewer horses and bayonets comment quickly became worldwide trends. Even his response Nothing Governor Romney says is true became a Nothing Gov trending topic in the U.S. and Nothing Governor Romney worldwide.

Bloomberg: Obama Winning Social Media, If #Hashtagwars Really Matter http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-22/obama-winning-social-media-if-hashtagwars-reallymatter.html Julianna Goldman October 22, 2012 In the battle to win every undecided voter, drive enthusiasm and boost turnout, a new front has opened in the 2012 election: the #hashtagwar. Within 24 hours of President Barack Obama dubbing Republican challenger Mitt Romneys policy shifts as Romnesia, #Romnesia was trending worldwide on Twitter. Within 48 hours, two Romnesia postings on Obamas Facebook page were liked by 364,963 people and shared nearly 57,696 times. On Tumblr, a series of animated pictures -- or GIFs -- with speech excerpts was liked or re-posted 16,861 times. A supporter records Mitt Romney on an iPad as he speaks during a campaign stop in Charlotte, North Carolina. Photographer: Rainier Ehrhardt/Getty Images Four years ago, when Facebook was one-tenth its size today and before smart phones were the norm, Obama pioneered the use of social media in presidential politics. Today, with the Internet an integral part of peoples lives, Obamas campaign again has the upper hand, leveraging its ability to communicate with masses on different platforms in ways that werent possible in 2008. Yet 2012 may present the first test of whether it makes a difference. Obama is operating at a different order of magnitude than Romney just in terms of raw numbers, said Nicco Mele, a professor at Harvard Universitys John F. Kennedy School of Government, who studies the integration of social media and politics. Were effectively in the dark ages of this. The eco- system is just so different and so new. Its really hard to figure out what is actually going to matter. True Test Ultimately, who wins the election will become the true metric for judging whether Obamas 31.1 million Facebook (FB) page likes versus Romneys 10.2 million matters. Surveys show that voters expect candidates to have a social media presence. Obamas campaign uses online activity to boost fundraising efforts, recruit volunteers and look for indications of whether theyve been successful at voter persuasion. They can monitor online conversations, gather intelligence about what messages are resonating and why. Its a multi-pronged strategy, with different sites targeted to different demographics and serving varying roles. Twitter, for example, reaches the political community more than it does undecided voters, a campaign official said. It shapes perceptions, day-to-day coverage and accelerates news cycles in a way that campaign officials said was exemplified during the first presidential debate in Denver. The Obama team lost the Twitter war then because within 30 minutes, the narrative that the president lost had already been set, an official said. Twitter Fight The Obama campaign made an effort not to cede Twitter ground in the remaining debates. During last weeks rematch between the president and Romney at Hofstra University in New York, 7.2 million posted Twitter messages referenced the debate, the candidates and related terms. The presidents account,

@BarackObama, sent out 37 messages during the 90-minute debate, which were then re-tweeted 117,374 times. Romneys handle, @MittRomney, sent two Twitter messages which were then re- tweeted 6,810 times. Related slideshow: Digital heckling with bayonets, binders and Big Bird When Romney said in the debate that he ordered up binders full of women to bring gender diversity to his Massachusetts cabinet, it sparked ridicule that ballooned on the web. A hashtag began trending nationally on Twitter, a Facebook page popped up and a steady flow of memes, Internet photos with superimposed logos, was soon coursing through the virtual world. People are swimming in a sea of political information and political chatter, said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The system has expanded because social media is now a very central part of campaign messaging and the way that people are talking about the election. Vanity Metrics Romney campaign officials say their adversaries are relying on a set of vanity metrics and that the barrage of Facebook posts, Twitter messages and re-tweets end up more like spam. While Obama may have more Facebook likes, Romney is on par in terms of the percentage of his supporters who are engaged, they said. Last night, for example, both the candidates Facebook pages had 2.9 million people talking about them. In the campaigns final weeks, Romneys social media operation has mobilized volunteers through online communities and driven voter turnout efforts, surpassing the metrics for the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona. Volunteers and aides have made 3.5 times as many phone calls and knocked on nearly four times as many doors than at this point four years ago, according to Zac Moffatt, the Romney campaigns digital director. The goal of our digital team is to be the best team that complements the objectives of the campaign, not to be viewed as the smartest digital entity in the country, said Moffatt. Social Networking Reach According to Pew, 36 percent of social networking site users say the online communications are very important or somewhat important to them in keeping up with political news. Roughly 60 percent of American adults use such sites as Facebook or Twitter and 66 percent of those users -- or 39 percent of all American adults -- have done at least one civic or political activity with social media, according to a Pew survey. Thirty-eight percent have used social media to like or promote material related to political or social issues that others have posted. Obama campaign officials said friend-to-friend validation and contact is more important than whether #bindersfullofwomen is trending. For that, Facebook provides the most mileage in terms of outreach and targeting persuadable voters. When friends of friends are factored into Obamas 31 million Facebook followers, through sharing, they can distribute without cost content that potentially reaches almost everyone in the U.S. Extending Grassroots

Social media is a natural extension of our massive grassroots organization and a variety of platforms offer unique opportunities to inform voters, mobilize supporters and get more people involved more deeply in this historic election, said Adam Fetcher, a campaign spokesman. The campaign also uses Facebook as a cheap way to quickly communicate and organize supporters, an official said. They cited womens outreach as especially effective through Facebook. The Women for Obama page has 1.16 million fans compared with the 92,250 for Moms for Mitt. Use of social media also provides multiple opportunities to raise money. Through August, the Obama campaign had raised $147 million from donors who had given him a cumulative total of $200 or less, according to the Campaign Finance Institute, a Washington- based group that analyzing political donations. Small Donors That was 34 percent of his total receipts from individuals over the course of the campaign. The numbers for Obama far exceeded Romneys $39.5 million from small donors, which amount to 18 percent of his total, the center found. Social media is very good at talking to people who agree with you and convincing them to take more actions but its really not clear if its good at changing someones mind, said Mele, who directed Internet operations for Democrat Howard Deans 2004 presidential primary campaign. A lot of the activity online is preaching to the choir in order to significantly boost online fundraising. To be sure, social media plays to Obamas demographic strengths with younger voters participating more, particularly on sites like Tumblr. Also, most voters arent living their lives waiting for whats the new meme thats going to help them decide their vote, said Rainie. Romney and his advisers argue Obamas campaign is overly taken with petty catch-phrases and Internet fads at a time when voters are preoccupied with much larger issues. At an Oct. 19 rally in Daytona Beach, Florida, Romney accused Obama of running an incredible shrinking campaign based on silly word games, saying he had no agenda for the future. This is a big country with big opportunities and big challenges, Romney said. And they keep talking about smaller and smaller things. POLITICO: Obama Campaign Emails Now Targeting Specific Individuals http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/10/obama-campaign-emails-now-targeting-specific-individuals139211.html Byron Tau October 22, 2012 The Obama campaign has ramped up its email microtargeting efforts, sending messages asking supporters on its email list to contact specific individuals in states with early voting to remind them to vote. The algorithm for identifying potential Obama voters in swing states is far from perfect.

In an email shared with POLITICO, for example, the Obama campaign asked Soren Dayton, a former John McCain campaign staffer (who had signed up to the campaign's email list and authorized it to access his Facebook account), to contact a self-described conservative-libertarian blogger based in Nevada. But it's the logical culmination of campaign email programs and social networking. The New York Times reported last week that campaigns have been testing whether personal contact from an acquaintance is more effective than from a unknown campaign volunteer. The tool works in conjunction with Facebook and suggestions of what voter to contact are only generated only after supporters give the campaign permission to access a list of their Facebook friends. Mitt Romney's campaign has rolled out a similar tool called Commit to Mitt, which connects supporters to voters in swing states via Facebook. The Romney campaign did not immediately respond to a question about whether they have or are planning any similar Facebook/email integration. Encouraging such peer-to-peer contacts is on the rise among campaigns and will likely be standard practice in future cycles for good reason. A recent study showed that a Facebook message informing users which of their friends had voted resulted in 340,000 additional votes during the 2010 election. The researchers concluded that voters who saw their friends had voted were much more likely to turn out to vote. Tech Crunch: Romneys New Facebook App Knows Which Friends Are Most Influential http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/22/romneys-new-facebook-app-knows-which-friends-are-most-influential/ Gregory Ferenstein October 22, 2012 Election-mania has driven more than 60% of Facebook users to engage civically or politically on the social network. Yet, most political posts wont be seen by undecided voters in battleground states, instead being wasted on the ears of unregistered citizens, committed partisans, or those residing in guaranteed blue and red states. Team Romney has therefore devised a clever app that finds which friends are most likely to be influential on Election Day, given their geography and history of Facebook political activity. All one needs to do is look at their own newsfeed to know that people want to talk about this election on Facebook; the question is, how can we make sure that activity is purposeful and effective at making a difference for the campaign, says Matt Lira, a well-known open government advocate in Virginia Congressman Eric Cantors office, who now works on Romneys digital team. The app, first launched with TechCrunch, draws on Facebooks open graph feature that permits software to personalize services based on a users information and activity history. Commit to Mitt unearths which friends live in influential states or have a (public) history of interacting with Romneys facebook page and recommends messaging them. If users dont have closeted supporters, or are likely to be more influential with a broadcast message, the app recommends posting a message to their wall. The app is a welcome addition to the nearly 1/5th of social media users who admit to blocking friends who use the Internet as their personal political soapbox. Indeed, one Facebook app, Nopple (no politics please) automatically blocks political posts for those users who still want to be friends after the election. Lira tells TechCrunch the first-of-its kind app was inspired by both a personal meeting with Mark Zuckerberg, during a well-publicized visit by House Republicans, and recent scientific evidence that Facebook political

messages boost voter turnout. The study found that a mass get-out-the-vote campaign drove 2.2% more voters to polls in 2010. Most importantly, 80% of the effect was indirect, caused by friends sharing the message. The study confirms other experimental evidence which finds that personal Facebook messaging can be more influential than broadcast-style wall posts. Personal messages are better for building a loyal customer base and make a product stickier, said New York University Professor, Sinan Aral. If a pro-Romney message gets posted in a forest of California voters, and no battleground citizens see it, does it make a difference? Probably not. Now you can target Facebook pals who are not only influential but still want to be friends after hearing you talk about politics. Check out the app here. CNN: Microtargeting: How Campaigns Know You Better Than You Know Yourself http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/05/politics/voters-microtargeting/index.html Allison Brennan November 5, 2012 (CNN) -- Political ads on the airwaves have been so pervasive this year that voters in battleground states probably see them in their sleep. But when a political spot pops up while surfing the Web, there's a good chance it's aimed right at you. The practice is called microtargeting and like a lot of marketing techniques on the Internet aimed at identifying consumer tastes and behaviors, it is an information-age approach that is helping change how political groups identify and interact with voters. Moreover, microtargeting may give pollsters, campaigns and interest groups a sharper idea of how candidates and issues may fare at the ballot box, raising concerns about personal privacy in a medium where government regulation is minimal. Obama, Romney make a mad dash in a final bid for votes In fact, "there is none," said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "Anonymity has been crucial to our political process. It's the reason for the secret ballot, it's the reason the Federalist Papers were anonymous," he said. Surfing the Web leaves a trail of browser history that allows marketing companies to glean insight into personal interests. Do you read The New York Times or watch Fox News? Do you have children? Do you shop in high-end stores or hunt for bargains on eBay? Do you support the Sierra Club or Club for Growth? Political strategy firms like Democratic DSPolitical and Republican CampaignGrid are gathering or buying up that data. They then match it to the publicly available voter rolls that were digitized as a part of a new federal law aimed at efforts to help improve voting procedures after the ballot controversies of the 2000 election.

What these firms receive is detailed information about how often a potential voter has cast a ballot in addition to data on what they read, where they shop and other consumer behavior tracked for decades off line. Jim Walsh of DSPolitical said the company has so far aggregated more than 600 million cookies -- or tags on Internet user IP addresses that track movements online -- and has worked to match them against lists of some 250 million voters in the United States. This all is aimed at helping them determine how someone might vote and then reaching them wherever they go online. Micro-targeting offers clues to early vote leads It is so efficient and such a natural extension of direct mail that Walsh called the way microtargeting is being used today "inevitable." In response to privacy advocates, CampaignGrid President Jordan Lieberman and Walsh said they aren't doing anything that hasn't been done before. "The data has been commercially available data for years -- we're not targeting you by who you voted for; we're targeting you if you tend to vote or participate in the democratic process," Lieberman said. And he said these strategies infringe less on privacy because they don't use names or physical mailing addresses like direct mail. "The reality is that we are more focused on privacy and we have more privacy protections than direct mail ... has used for decades," Lieberman said. This they said is because lists generated from browser histories are stripped of any personal information before they are used to target potential voters. Both companies said they use a third party vendor to remove that data and match the files. Lieberman wouldn't identify CampaignGrid's vendor, calling it "part of the special sauce." DSPolitical and CampaignGrid aren't the only ones in the game. Final CNN/ORC national poll: It's all tied up Google, Facebook and other data powerhouses are also in on the action, albeit in a different way. For instance, Google said it doesn't collect or allow its advertisers to use personally identifiable information, including political information, to reach potential customers or voters. But it does allow marketers, political or otherwise, to target its users based on specific demographic information. The company launched its Google Political Toolkit and campaign tools via YouTube, offering candidates the chance to "promote your videos using Google AdWords for video to reach exactly the audience you want -by age, gender, location or other criteria." Facebook is also using its vast amount of personal information during the election.

Currently there are more than 110,000 political Facebook pages in the United States and more than 11,000 U.S.-based pages for politicians, according to a Facebook spokesman. While Facebook doesn't hand over personally identifiable information, it does allow advertisers to seek out subsections of the population based on their preferences on Facebook. ProPublica also reported on how other search engine giants are selling their users' browser history to campaigns. What companies, who follow a model of self regulation, and campaigns are doing isn't popular with the public. When asked if they wanted "political advertising tailored to your interests," 86% of Americans surveyed said they did not, according to a study from the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg school of Communication released last July. Provisional ballots could be key if Ohio margin razor thin Sixty-four percent said their support for a candidate would decrease if they found out a candidate was microtargeting them differently than their neighbor. The study also found that 20% more respondents reacted more strongly to political targeting than they did to being targeted as a consumer. "There's a lot to say in favor of campaigns targeting voters in this way, (but) there is a lot to be concerned about," said Eitan Hersh, a political science professor at Yale University who studies the impact of microtargeting on campaigns and the political process. "People like being targeted in many ways," said Hersh. "Many people like that Amazon knows what kind of books they like. If a campaign knows that you're of this religion and this race and went to college, you're likely to have a different set of values ... the campaign is likely to reach out to you on those attributes." But there is always a danger that the campaign will misfire or that the ads will seem like "pandering," Hersh said. "The downside, of course, Is that we might not like being stereotyped," he explained. Still, microtargeting makes an uphill process easier for the campaigns, especially at the presidential level. "How do you start by trying to convince 200 million people that you they should vote for you?" asked Hersh. "The task is hard. Data helps and permits campaigns to talk to people about issues they care about," he continued. And the data does help. Know your polling place Besides ads that show up before a YouTube video or banner ads on the websites users visit, they dictate scripts that door-to-door canvassers read. They also improve efficiency of campaign voter turnout efforts and reduce costs since ads online are significantly less expensive than television spots.

In the age of DVR, microtargeting can also guarantee that voters actually see campaign ads. "We can serve a pre-roll video ad," Walsh said, referring to ads viewers see before videos online, "which is great stuff, it forces you to watch it before you get to your content. The big problem for advertisers these days is that everyone is fast forwarding through their videos." A sign of how often these ads are used by political campaigns -- "online video inventory has been sold out," Lieberman said, in many of the key battleground states looking into the final days of the campaign. Privacy and civil liberties activists don't propose shutting down online advertising. Instead, they favor an optin versus the opt-out option currently available to consumers and voters -- a "Do Not Track" mechanism. Calabrese says the trick is not getting browsers to add the mechanism, but getting other Web companies to agree to it. Yahoo recently said it would not honor the "Do Not Track" button Microsoft is installing in Microsoft Explorer 10. Could close race produce a popular/electoral vote split? "The pushback has been that there is a business model out there that wants to track you all the time," Calabrese said. "They can wring more and more advertising dollars out of you." But don't look for this practice to end. Lieberman says it's just the beginning. Looking toward the next election cycle, CampaignGrid signed a deal with AT&T combining AT&T's mobile network with its online voter data files. The next frontier is to reach voters with ads on their "IP-addressable" television sets, serving the same targeted ads that people see online, during the commercial breaks on their favorite shows. And Lieberman says they are adding data crunching power to what he calls "rich data sets." As Duke political science professor Sunshine Hillygus said, "There's no turning back on microtargeting." CNN: Election Takes Over American Conversation on Facebook http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/11/05/election-takes-over-american-conversation-on-facebook/ Eric Weisbord November 5, 2012 (CNN) - With Election Day just hours away, the election has dominated Facebook chatter among users in the United States. According to data provided to CNN by the social media giant, the four terms or phrases used most in posts or comments from users in the United States are vote, Obama, Romney, & election. To put that further into context, Facebook says that typically the top terms on a Sunday and Monday in the Fall are related to football. With more than 170 million people, over half the U.S. population, actively using Facebook, this gives a glimpse into how the elections are taking over the American conversation. Follow CNN Politics on Facebook

The fifth most popular term is "Remember the 5th of November," a reference to Guy Fawkes Day, an annual commemoration of a seventeen-century attempt to blow up the British parliament. In modern day, the phrase has been adopted by anti-government protesters and activists as a rallying cry. The next three terms, Sunday football, Falcons & Doug Martin, all relate to the NFL. The top terms are over a 24-hour period (12pm Saturday to 12pm Sunday). Top 8 Trending terms/phrases in the US right now: - Vote (remember to vote, vote tomorrow) - Obama (Obama, President Obama, Obama's record) - Romney - Election - Remember the 5th of November ('gunpowder treason' and other terms around Guy Fawkes Day) - Sunday football - Falcons (Beat Cowboys in the Sunday Night Football game) - Doug Martin (Rookie Buccaneers" running back rushed 251 yards and scored 4 touchdowns in Sunday's win over the Raiders) CNET: Facebook Wants You To Vote http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57544722-93/facebook-wants-you-to-vote/ Donna Tam November 5, 2012 When you log in to Facebook on Election Day you will likely be greeted by a note reminding you of your civic duty. The social network is expected to post messages for its voting-age members in the U.S., as it did in 2010 when it sent out a "Today is Election Day" note to the 61 million users who were of voting age. The note included a link to polling places and an "I Voted" button that would let your friends know you went to the polls. When you decide to broadcast that you voted, you could be inadvertently convincing your friends to go out and vote as well. In a study led by the University of California, San Diego, researchers showed that these 2010 users were persuaded less by civic duty and more by peer pressure. Users who saw photos of friends who voted attached to the message were more likely to vote. Users who saw the same message with no friends' photos attached were just as likely to vote as users who didn't receive a message at all. So how much would a nudge from Facebook affect this year's election? Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, said it's difficult to give a hard number on how many more people would vote because of a note on their Facebook pages, since it's difficult to pinpoint what moves a voter. "The messaging is saturated with automated calls, brochures, ads on TV.... It will be hard to isolate a single metric," he said.

But what seems clear is that Facebook has changed at least some Americans' approach to politics. Political campaigns have increasingly touted Facebook as a valuable tool. After the 2008 presidential election, some pundits pointed to Barack Obama's command of the network as a factor in his success. But this time around he has more competition in the space. "It was still a novelty and a sidelight," Rainie said of Facebook. "That's why Obama owned the space as much as he did. Now everybody is sure of it." In addition to political campaigns turning to Facebook as a tool to connect with voters, the social network has been increasing its own efforts to encourage voting, partnering with CNN to launch an "I'm Voting" app this year, and adding voter registration as a preset "life event" on its Timeline. In July, Facebook partnered with Washington state to let users register to vote through a Facebook app. It's an opportunity for campaigns and public agencies to increase voter turnout -- 66 percent of U.S. Internet users who are of voting age use Facebook. Rainie said Pew's studies have shown that Facebook affects how people vote. He published a study Friday about how social media -- mainly Facebook -- affects political views. The study found that 25 percent of users surveyed say they became more active in regard to a political issue after discussing it or reading posts about it on social media. What's more, 16 percent actually changed their minds about an issue because of what they encountered on social media. Overall, Rainie said, people often make political decisions based on two things: how the media portrays an issue, and from watching how others who are really engaged are talking about an issue. And since 69 percent of Internet users are on Facebook, its not a surprise that those discussions are happening there now. "Social media just puts this all on a much grander stage," Rainie said. "People can watch more, grander conversations unfold." It'll be interesting to see how things play out this time around, particularly because Facebook's demographics have changed dramatically since the last presidential election. In 2008, 72 percent of Facebook's adult users were under the age of 35. Now that percentage has dropped to 35 percent. Rainie found that Facebook is a sounding board for those who feel they aren't in power. That's because the media covers those in power the most. In 2008, Facebook was mainly used by liberals and Democrats to talk about political issues. When the roles of power reversed, conservatives and Republicans took to posting. "When you're out of power, there's more reason to complain about the team that is in power," Rainie said. Hemet Press Enterprise: Will Facebook Factor in Tuesdays City Council Election http://blog.pe.com/hemet/2012/11/03/hemet-will-facebook-factor-in-tuesdays-city-council-election/ Craig Schultz November 3, 2012 The Hemet City Council election race has been anything but quiet. Signs are all over town. All but a couple of the nine candidates have been stumping at senior housing developments and large public candidate forums. Mailboxes have been stuffed with literature.

But in the end, how much of a difference will the Facebook crowd, for lack of a better description, have on the outcome of the race? Hundreds of people, organized on social media, turned out at City Council meetings this summer demanding that the city do something about such quality of life issues as crime and blight. There were so many people that council meetings were moved temporarily to the public library where the Rebuild Hemet folks continue to have tailgate potlucks in the parking lot on meeting nights. The Rebuilding Hemet group on Facebook has 2,737 members. Rebuild Hemet has 3,189 friends. I asked six of the candidates whether that translates into a voting bloc and whether it will be large enough to determine the outcome of the election. All of them praised the movement. They say it is making a difference. They think everybody should get involved like these folks have. Crimeni said he believes the group is a couple thousand strong. I think they will influence the election, he told me. He thinks they, and Hemets large senior population, will decide the outcome. Brishen Kruse, the write-in, said he expects the Facebook group will have a noticeable impact. Considering that I am running on the Facebook group platform, I certainly hope so, he said. Is there a Facebook group platform? Richard Avila is not sure. He says some postings indicate the entire group is endorsing candidates when other members may disagree. Bonnie Wright said there is a core group of followers who will be influenced, but there are a lot of senior citizens in the community who dont even go on Facebook. It is difficult to get the message out. Many of the Facebook followers live outside the city limits, she said, so they wont be voting on the Hemet candidates. Robert Youssef, the sitting mayor, said he is not sure how Facebook will play in the outcome. For the most part these are good citizens who want to clean up the town, he said. There are a few hecklers or bomb throwers who have a political agenda. Now my fear is that it is going to hurt the folks who want to do cleaning projects and things like that. Shellie Milne said she is wating to see. She said she was involved in the Tea Party movement and that too many people, including the press, were under the mistaken impression that everyone agreed on all of the issues. We dont all think in lock step, she said, and that may be true for Hemets Facebook crowd as well.

WSJ: How Facebook, Twitter Court Political Campaigns http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204707104578092990628610764.html By SHIRA OVIDE and EVELYN M. RUSLI 11/02/2012 Social-media companies Facebook Inc. FB +0.81% and Twitter Inc. are trying to turn political advertising into a big business, courting presidential candidates, political-action committees and interest groups to siphon off some of the billions of dollars spent on election ads.

Over the past year, the companies have met with hundreds of political groups to tutor them on effective social-media ad strategies. They've also staffed up to work with political campaigns to tailor ads to specific voters and snag ad dollars. "We want to spend every waking moment talking to political advertisers about how they can use Twitter to win," said Peter Greenberger, Twitter's head of political advertising sales and the executive who established Google Inc.'s GOOG +1.45% political-advertising arm in 2007. When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney picked running mate Paul Ryan in August, Democratic opposition-research group American Bridge 21st Century wanted to bring attention to its new website, MeetPaulRyan.com. That's when Twitter came into the picture. The San Francisco-based company had held several brainstorming sessions with American Bridge to coach the group on how to use Twitter ads to quickly circulate its political announcements. Based on those meetings, American Bridge decided to pay for a Twitter message to promote its MeetPaulRyan.com website. The ad showed up at the top of the Twitter page when users searched for terms such as "Romney," "Paul Ryan" or "vice president." The ad, known as a "promoted tweet," appeared about 160,000 times, and nearly 5,000 Twitter users clicked on it, said American Bridge, which has since bought more than two dozen Twitter ads. "We've been very pleased" by the Twitter ads and the response to them, said American Bridge President Rodell Mollineau, who adds that his organization can't afford widespread TV commercials. The social-media companies "have been in tune to what we're trying to accomplish." Across the aisle, Facebook pitched Mr. Romney's campaign to be among the first users of the service's ads on cellphones. The campaign is now one of the biggest buyers of Facebook mobile ads. These ads, which show up in a Facebook user's news feed, link to Mr. Romney's page and indicate which friends are fans of the candidate. About 10% of people who viewed the ads clicked through, said Zac Moffatt, digital director for Mr. Romney's campaign. "There's not an advertising product that they offered that we haven't at least beta-tested," Mr. Moffatt said, declining to give specifics on how much the campaign has spent on social-media ads. Mr. Romney's campaign also recently purchased Twitter ads so when a person searches Twitter.com for "Obama," the most-prominent post is a criticism of President Barack Obama's policies towards Israel.

Twitter ads are sold by computerized bidding for words or terms, similar to how Google sells ads alongside Web-search results. Twitter said the most in-demand political keyword ads include "Obama," "Romney" and "vote." For Twitter and Facebook, political advertising isn't yet big money. Research firm Borrell Associates predicts digital political advertising will reach $170 million this year, more than sixfold the levels of 2008 but still less than 2% of the $9.8 billion estimated total election spending, which remains dominated by TV commercials. But Twitter and Facebook, which declined to disclose the political-ad revenue they're reaping, said success with political campaigns isn't just about the moneyit can also help win more advertising overall from marketers selling soap or cellphones. Indeed, Twitter and Facebook are compiling case studies to show nonpolitical marketers how political campaigns used social-media ads. "Ever since the 1960s with the Kennedy election, political campaigns have led marketing thought," said Adam Bain, Twitter's president of global revenue. Facebook and Twitter executives said now is the time to make political ads into a bigger business, given that most candidates and others in the Washington political machine use Twitter and Facebook to stay connected with constituents, keep up on news and bicker with rivals. "We used to have to convince campaigns to sign up and be part of the digital bandwagon," said Adam Conner, a manager of public policy at Facebook. "Now it's step one." Facebook now has half a dozen employees in Washington D.C., Austin, Texas and its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters working with political campaigns, up from one in 2008. The company has pitched political consultants on targeting ads at users based on the email addresses of supporters. Facebook has also passed tips to political campaigns, including how Facebook users are most likely to engage with a political ad shown from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m., said Katie Harbath, a manager of public policy at Facebook. The company speaks to each campaign's digital staff nearly every day, according to members of both teams. Twitter launched its political-ad effort last fall after the company identified politics as a pillar of its young revenue strategy. "We thought this was going to be the year of the Twitter election," Mr. Bain said. The group of staffers pitching political ads is the only Twitter ad team devoted to a single industry. Twitter also recently commissioned research aimed to show political operatives how Twitter users who see frequent tweets and Twitter ads from campaigns are more likely to make political donations. Political campaigns are spending on the "promoted tweet," which looks like a regular Twitter post and which advertisers pay to have show up at the top of a stream of tweets, or to people who might not see the tweet otherwise, the company said. Based on demand from political campaigns, Twitter also prioritized a project announced in September to let advertisers tailor paid messages to people by state or region. This would presumably let campaigns target voters in swing states such as Ohio and Colorado. The pace of political-ad efforts at the social-media companies has picked up in recent weeks. Before one of the recent presidential debates, Twitter's Mr. Greenberger called and emailed political-related advertisers to suggest they craft ads based on words likely to generate attention during the debate.

For example, on Twitter's suggestion, seniors group AARP bought ads during a presidential debate tied to terms such as Medicare and Candy Crowley, the debate moderator. Mr. Greenberger said after next week's election, "we take a vacation"but then Twitter's political ads team will shift attention to the next drama in Washington. "The lame-duck Congress could be a very busy term," he said. Huffington Post: Politics in the Social Media Age: Insights from Joe Lockhart http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-kanalley/politics-social-media-age_b_1989858.html Craig Kanalley October 19, 2012 Joe Lockhart is in a unique place to have a word or two about the ever-changing media and technology landscapes and their impact on politics. The former White House Press Secretary for Bill Clinton spent years in politics, but he actually started his career in broadcast journalism and most recently served as Facebook's VP of Corporate Communications. He had a number of fascinating insights on tech, media and politics at the Brooklyn Law School on Friday. Here are some highlights from his talk with Brooklyn Law School Dean Nick Allard, "Campaign 2012: Who is Setting the Agenda?" On the media's election coverage this year: -"Not going to give them a good grade"; we're in a "period of profound transition" and the media isn't doing a good enough job educating & informing the public Tech transformation: -In 1980, there were no 24-hour news stations; there was three networks, tens of millions of people watched three men say here's what's happening in the country, in the world -There was a consensus, a common conversation around the country; tech and 24/7 news cycle fundamentally changed that -News is now fragmented and the American people get it from a variety of places, including social media How people get their news now: -We're now entering an era where people are informing each other, through the likes of Facebook and Twitter, but we're not quite there yet -If you're conservative, you're more likely to watch Fox News, if you're liberal, you're more likely to watch MSNBC; the same with newspapers and so on -It's tougher to get facts and think for yourself; this system is not best serving the public Ignorance online: -"There is a lot of sharing but there's just as much sharing of ignorance as knowledge" -Need a centralized core of journalism to inform people, and we don't have that now -We need more authorities, otherwise people will just go to their friends Social media's impact on politics: -Things now are so connected and so immediate -Washington is a town built on power and the pursuit of power -Internet provides instant reactions and both parties try to jump on that; if not for now, for an edge in the

next election -It has sped up the news cycle, putting pressure on campaigns to respond more quickly and leaving less time to develop a narrative Future of social media: -The technology is just scratching the surface of its promise -Where do you turn when you don't trust a central power or institution? You turn to your friends -The tech can be even more interesting and powerful as it scales; smartphones are cheaper than computers and will become ubiquitous; everyone will be connected through phones -You can see what your friends think immediately, and things happen much quicker; friends talk about it, their friends talk about it, it goes viral, etc. Business implications today: -A large portion of news business is about staying afloat now or making a profit, less about journalism -That's really changed the dynamics of how politics is discussed or covered -The media "wants to put on a show"; it's more about style and less about what the public needs to know -There are "a couple newspapers left driven by journalism and not by business, but that's it." -It's scary. We're starting to see major cities without newspapers. -Business driving editorial is scary. "When I started in the business, I didn't see that to be the case." -Why is Fox News, MSNBC so successful? Found an audience that led to a gold mine. On media picking "winners" or "losers" after debates: -They talk a lot, and then the numbers come out and then they change their tune to the numbers -The public processes information over time though, big swings happen 3-4 days after a debate when people decide what they found important -"The media doesn't give people the best tools to make the best decision they could" On the rise of fact checking: -Yes, there are fact checkers, but content producers are always going to beat fact checkers and censors -You can fact check, but it's already out there in the media bloodstream; not everyone sees the fact check after the fact Legal ways to improve media landscape? -Not sure. The law was written in a way with three major media networks in mind. Now it's not like that. -How can you enforce fairness in media? Not sure you can.

The Guardian: Koch-Based Activists Use Power Of Data In Bid To Oust Obama From White House http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/18/koch-backed-activists-americans-for-prosperity By Ed Pilkington October 18, 2012 Americans for Prosperity, the Tea Party-aligned group part-funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, is building a state-of-the-art digital ground operation in Ohio and other vital battleground states to spread its anti-Obama message to voters who could decide the outcome of the presidential election. The group hopes that by creating a local army of activists equipped with sophisticated online micro-targeting tools it will increase its impact on moderate voters, nudging them towards a staunchly conservative position

opposed to President Obama's economic and healthcare policies. Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is spending tens of millions of dollars developing its local strategy, already employing more than 200 permanent staff in 32 states. Classified a non-profit "social welfare" organisation, AFP is legally obliged to project itself as a non-partisan campaign that neither endorses nor opposes candidates for public office. But there is no disguising its targets, nor their political nature. In Ohio, volunteers are given a script which they follow when engaging voters. "President Obama took office three years ago and promised to fix our economy," they say, "yet unemployment is still high and our debt is up to $6tn." AFP has already spent $30m so far this election cycle in opposing President Obama and other prominent Democratic candidates and their policies. It says it aims to reach up to 9 million targeted voters in crucial swing states, through the efforts of its 2 million activists. But it is ambitions do not stop on election day on 6 November. "The goal is to build a long-term grassroots infrastructure," its president, Tim Phillips, told the Guardian. "We are not some election-year group desperately trying to ramp up attention we are in this year-in year-out to make a difference in favour of economic freedom." AFP's growing influence is highly visible in Ohio, one of the most crucial battleground states upon which November's outcome depends. It now has 80 paid staff operating in the state out of seven permanent offices. Volunteers are empowered with mobile canvassing technology that directs them to the households that are most likely to be influenced by AFP's message of small government and tax cuts through software built on to handheld tablet computers. They are also equipped with the latest phone banking technology through which they have made 400,000 calls to Ohio's voters since May. AFP's funding status allows it to raise unlimited sums from undisclosed sources, among them David and Charles Koch, brothers whose oil, coal and plastics businesses have earned them personal wealth of $25bn each. David Koch is president of the organisation's foundation. Research by the independent Wesleyan Media Project has found that AFP is spending an astonishing $6m every two weeks on TV advertising that favours Mitt Romney's presidential candidacy. That pays for more than 7,000 TV ads to be served in the battleground states and outguns even Romney's own spending on political adverts. With the presidential race tightening across the country in the wake of Obama's widely denounced performance in the first TV debate earlier this month, all eyes have turned to Ohio, which Romney must win if he is to have a fighting chance of taking the White House. No Republican candidate in history has won the presidency without bagging Ohio's electoral college votes that today stand at 18 out of the 270 needed for victory. Polls vary widely in Ohio, making predictions difficult. But the latest tracking survey by Real Clear Politics has Obama two points ahead of Romney a statistical tie. AFP is also waging an aggressive campaign against Sherrod Brown, the Democratic senator for Ohio, under the rubric: "Has Brown worked for you?" It has a fleet of vans bearing the senator's picture with the logo: "Obama's rubber stamp for failure."

Leading figures within the Ohio Democratic party have been watching the activities of AFP and other outlying conservative groups with mounting alarm. Ted Strickland, the former Democratic governor of Ohio, told the Guardian that in his view the activities of such groups had the capacity "to move us from a democracy to an oligarchy where a handful of wealthy people use their money to try to control the political process". Strickland said that Brown's struggle to get re-elected was a "clear example of the corrosive influence of outside money. He should be 20 points ahead were it not for a massive amount of negative advertising coming from billionaires trying to buy a senate seat". (Recent polls have put Brown and his Republican challenger, Josh Mandel, neck and neck, though the latest survey from the Columbus Dispatch shows the incumbent pulling ahead.) AFP's ground operation in Ohio and other states is built around an interactive online network that links its volunteers with a centralised database of information on millions of American voters. The database, called Themis after the Greek god of wisdom, was created with the help of seed money from the Kochs. The database draws information on voters from a range of public and commercial sources to create a profile of their likely political behaviour. What you buy on Amazon; the magazines your subscribe to; your friends on Facebook; your age, neighbourhood, occupation and house value; what petitions you have signed; what church you belong to; whether or not you own a gun all such data points and many more go towards the creation of your personal, albeit anonymous, voter file. That, in turn, allows AFP activists to micro-target households with a level of precision that could only be dreamed about in previous generations. "This is an exponential leap forward for our side with Themis as our crucial partner, we are able to leverage our dollars and refine our message," Phillips said. Much media attention has been paid this election cycle to the avalanche of billionaires' money, including that of the Koch brothers, that has been spent on negative TV adverts. But in the longer term, the creation of this local lattice of activists able to identify key voters through online micro-targeting could prove to be a far more effective political weapon. In AFP's case, its interactive database serves up what the group calls an "affinity score" for each voter. He or she is awarded a number from 0 to 1. Those registering 0 on the scale being so leftwing and pro-government in outlook that, from the organisation's perspective, they are not worth bothering with. Those showing a 1 are equally worth bypassing because they are already so in favour of tax and spending cuts that to talk to them would be preaching to the converted. The technology is interactive, so that if a volunteer discovers that the affinity score of a voter on the doorstep is inaccurate he or she is found to be more or less fiscally conservative than the rating suggests it can be instantly corrected. The information is sent back at the push of a button to Themis, which is thus constantly updated and improved. The target group for AFP are those voters who fall between 0.4 and 0.6 on the affinity score those moderate voters deemed by its digital planners to be "persuadables". "Our goal is to get everybody into the 0.7 to 1 zone. We want to move the center towards economic freedom, to drive the debate through wordof-mouth marketing," says Matt Seaholm, the national field director of AFP. He added that in his view it was working; that AFP were driving the debate to the right. "Cap-in-trade is now a dirty word. Stimulus is now a dirty word. Debt and spending are at the forefront. These were things that were not talked about in the past."

AFP began testing its new micro-targeting gadgetry in Wisconsin last year, where it used the technology to energise its 120,000 activists in a succession of volatile recall elections. The group's efforts were one factor behind the survival of the Tea Party-backed governor, Scott Walker, in his recall vote this June. Phillips rejects the argument that AFP and other conservative outside groups are having a pernicious impact on the democratic process. "We are proud to have the support of the Kochs. They have every right to be involved in the political process they have been steadfast in this area for four decades." He added that for Obama and other Democrats to complain about corporate money entering politics was "hypocrisy at its greatest. It's laughable, and most Americans know it. Obama receives tens of millions from Hollywood and the entertainment industry so that is good money, and other money is bad?" Washington Post: Why Facebook Campaign Ads Are a Suckers Bet http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/10/17/why-facebook-campaign-ads-are-asuckers-bet/?wprss=rss_ezra-klein Dylan Matthews October 17, 2012 Much has been made of the use of social media this campaign cycle, from the Democratic National Committees Web site mocking Mitt Romneys tax plan to President Obamas citation of Mean Girls on his own sites Tumblr page to the Romney campaigns tweets showing the nominees family playing Jenga before the first presidential debate. But does this really have an impact on potential voters? A new study suggests not. Columbias Donald Green, a leading scholar on campaign effects, and Berkeleys David Broockman (last seen proving that state legislators show racial bias in handling constituent requests) paired up with a state legislature candidate and bought Facebook ads targeting a random sample of his potential voters. They bid an extremely high amount for the ads, so that a voter in the treatment group was exposed to an ad every single time they loaded any Facebook page during the entire week. They tested three types of ads: one aimed at boosting name recognition, one that touted the candidates experience and one that focused on his policies. So did the ads work? Nope. Broockman and Green concluded that the ads had no politically consequential effect on knowledge of the candidate, his favorability or support for his election among voters. So, theres no evidence that the ads even worked to get the candidates name out there, much less increase support for his candidacy. The experiment lasted only a week, and the effects might have been greater for a congressional or gubernatorial race. But Broockman and Green really carpet-bombed those voters, and even those who said they used Facebook during the ad week werent any more likely to have heard of the candidate than those who did not use the social network. Given that Green and his co-authors have in the past found positive (though short-lived) effects on potential voters from TV campaign ads, this study suggests that campaigns may want to keep to tradition when it comes to ad strategy. Mashable: Second presidential debate: less Twitter, more Facebook http://mashable.com/2012/10/17/hofstra-debate-twitter-facebook/ Alex Fitzpatrick October 17, 2012

While the first presidential debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney set a new politics record on Twitter, the second only saw a fraction of the tweets sent during the first: 7.2 million for Tuesdays town hall event to the first debates 10.3 million. One might argue that Twitters numbers going down might be a sign that Tuesdays debate wasnt as popular overall on social media than the first debate. However, according to an analysis from Attention, powered by Tracx, engagement across social networks during the second debate was at 31% a high since Attention began tracking the debate on social media in March. For reference, engagement during the first debate was rated at 20%. If the conversation wasnt happening on Twitter, where did it all go? Facebook. Nearly 40% of the online conversations about Tuesdays debate happened on Facebook, while an equal percentage was seen on Twitter. During the first debate, those percentages were 77% 6% in Twitters favor. What does that trend show? Possibly, more two-way conversations and less broadcasting. Since messages on Twitter tend to be one-sided and immediate, it is harder to engage with in a meaningful way, argues Attentions analysis. The increased mentions on Facebook indicates conversations and, accordingly, debates. The data may also reflect the instant popularity of the Binders Full of Women Facebook page, which got more than 260,000 likes overnight. A similar Tumblr account and plenty of parody Twitter accounts also gained some traction, but didnt receive the same traction as the Facebook page. Attention includes Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube, blogs, forums and news websites in its analysis of conversation on the social web. Did you prefer using Twitter or posting to Facebook during the debates? Or did you use a different social network to vocie your opinion? Share your thoughts in the comments. Washington Post: Binders Full of Women Romney quip goes viral http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/arts-post/post/binders-full-of-women-romney-quip-goesviral/2012/10/17/f4cf31b4-1813-11e2-9855-71f2b202721b_blog.html Maura Judkis & Michael Cavna October 17, 2012 They brought me binders full of women, said Mitt Romney during Tuesday nights debate. Those binders full of women brought social media users a newsfeed full of jokes. Though Romneys remark was a response to a question about equality in the workplace, and referred to his search for employees while governor, the sound byte was a comedic gift to those on Twitter and Tumblr, who immediately went to work creating memes. Shortly after the debate, the Tumblr Binders Full of Women began to make the social media rounds. It contained pictures of ladylike binders, and a play on the phrase Trapper Keeper: Trap her keep her.

No one puts baby in a binder, declared Dirty Dancings Patrick Swayze in one photo caption. The Tumblr joked that the binders full of women each come equipped with a pack of Bic lady pens a feminist meme from earlier this summer. Naturally, McKayla was not impressed. A Binders Full of Women Facebook page, which shares statistics about pay disparity, now has more than 250,000 likes. I started the page immediately after I heard Gov. Romneys comment, said Michael, the 24-year-old administrator of the page, who didnt want to give his last name. The context didnt sound right and the quote was pretty humorous. Its important for voters to be informed before Election Day, so I used this page to post a few statistics regarding income inequality in the U.S. The page has grown tremendously, he said. Social media phenomena such as this one fizzle quickly, so Im glad I seized the moment while I had the chance. Hopefully, it has served its purpose. On Twitter, Big Bird, the meme spawned by Romney in the last debate, got in on the action: And finally, Dan Lacey, the always-topical Painter of Pancakes has never shied away from politics before and last night was no exception. He made a speedy painting of Romney holding his binders of women. Its for sale on eBay now, and the top bid so far is $67. Uncrunched: Fight Evil Mutant Corn with Facebook Promote and Prop 37 http://uncrunched.com/2012/10/15/mutant-corn-prop-37/ October 15, 2012 Prop 37 is on the California Ballot. It seems inoffensive enough all it requires is for food in California to be labelled if it contains genetically modified stuff. Some sixty countries already require this, including all of Europe, Japan, Brazil, Russia, India and China. Not here, though. Not if the huge food companies can stop it. Nearly $35 million has been raised to defeat Prop 37, with at least $1 million each from companies like Monsanto, Dupont, Pepsi, Nestle, Coca Cola and Conagra. General Mills, Del Monte, Kellogg, Hershey, Smucker, Ocean Spray, Sara Lee and lots of other big food companies have also made large donations. Supporters of Prop 37 have raised just $4.1 million. Some people think genetically altered food is just fine, and they may be right. But theres at least some evidence that it isnt fine. And while were figuring that out, whats wrong with simply telling consumers whats actually in the food theyre eating? Nothings wrong with that. Unless youre a huge food company that uses tons (literally) of genetically modified food in your products and dont want people to know that. Tech entrepreneur Ali Partovi, whos long been interested in the intersection of food and technology, is trying to even the playing field for Prop 37. First, hes matching every dollar in donations to support Prop 37. Donate here on indiegogo -Kick the mutant asses out of your food! (you have to watch the video above to get the double entendre). Indiegogo is an excellent crowdfunding platform for causes that allows matching funds.

But Partovi is also using Facebook to help spread awareness. Hes asking people to post their thoughts on Facebook and include Yes on 37 Contest Entry in the update. And if you really want to support Prop 37, hes asking you to use the new Facebook Promote feature where you can pay $7 to make sure more of your Facebook friends and subscribers see your message. Why Facebook? Says Partovi My goal is to run ads on Facebook, where you cant fool people with deceptive ads, because the communitys opinions speak louder. Partovi has a good point. We live in a democracy, but too often huge corporations dictate how that democracy works. We can use technology to make it all work again. And what happens in California can snowball into change throughout the U.S.: What happens in California doesnt stay in California: This is just the start. If passed, Prop 37 will benefit not just California but all Americans. To cite Michael Pollans brilliant NY Times essay, this is the moment of truth for a much larger nationwide movement. This vote is also symbolic, because it is not Democrat vs Republican, but people against big corporations. Voters from all points of view care about what they feed their families, and Prop 37 has strong support from both ends of the political spectrum. What hinges on the outcome is whether the people in this country can take back control of the system. Im using Indiegogo, the open, global crowd-funding platform, because even outside America, watchful eyes are waiting to see what happens. We are California. We are the pioneers. We are the creatives and the risk-takers. If anybody can figure out how to win this, we can. Prop 37 FTW! Do this. Fight the evil mutant corn. Even if it is sort of delicious. Forbes: Social Networking Facebook and the Vote http://www.forbes.com/sites/helaineolen/2012/10/14/facebook-and-the-vote/ Helaine Olen October 14, 2012 The surveillance state is coming to a voting booth near you, thanks to a creepy alliance between political campaigns and popular social networking sites that resembles nothing so much as a lost chapter from a George Orwell novel. Charles Duhigg at The New York Times reports on how both the Obama and Romney campaigns are turning to market research and data mining in an effort to boost voter turnout in their favor. The campaigns have now moved behind the traditional snooping - you know, the sort of stuff where they figure out that those who patronize Red Lobster are more likely to vote for Obama, while those who prefer Olive Garden are more likely to favor Romney. No, they now demand volunteers turn over their social media profiles. Data specialists will then request that they contact designated friends, those they believe are likely to support their candidate thanks to dining at certain restaurants, or listening to a particular type of music, but need a nudge or shove or some other action given a clever nickname the better to disguise what is essentially a massive invasion of privacy so that they actually turn up at a polling booth. Then

In the weeks before Election Day, millions of voters will hear from callers with surprisingly detailed knowledge of their lives. These callers friends of friends or long-lost work colleagues will identify themselves as volunteers for the campaigns or independent political groups. The callers will be guided by scripts and call lists compiled by people or computers with access to details like whether voters may have visited pornography Web sites, have homes in foreclosure, are more prone to drink Michelob Ultra than Corona or have gay friends or enjoy expensive vacations. And if a voter resists the pressure and decides to sit the election out on their couch? After these conversations, when those targeted voters open their mailboxes or check their Facebook profiles, they may find that someone has divulged specifics about how frequently they and their neighbors have voted in the past. Calling out people for not voting, what experts term public shaming, can prod someone to cast a ballot. But not to worry! Both campaigns says they absolutely do not plan to engage in pinning the Scarlet V on possible supporters who let them down. That, my friends, is what superPACS are for, that is, the anonymous corporate and personal money flowing into the political process in the wake of the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court. As one Democratic party consultant told Duhigg, They dont have to put anything on the flier to let the voter know who to blame. Now we know why Facebook is not making any effort to curb the increasing invasions of privacy that are occurring as a result of more and more consumers are using the site. They know no one in Washington is going to take action to stop it. Why would they? Politicians are doing it themselves. Finally, a personal note: if anyone does this to me you can assume this is the last friendly phone call or other connection we will share. I imagine I am far from alone in that sentiment. USA Today: Political Spats on Facebook Spill into Real Life http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2012/10/12/facebook-politics-unfriend-obamaromney/1597491/ Laura Petrecca October 13, 2012 Jason Perlow thought it was just a spirited debate. A friend posted some negative information about presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Facebook, and Perlow, who considers himself a moderate, pointed out what he saw as flaws in that commentary. That online disagreement escalated into an offline disintegration of their more-than-10-year friendship. "He got really angry with me," says Perlow, 43. "He defriended me on Facebook and told me not to send him any more e-mails. He also defriended my wife, who had nothing to do with it." Most people know the social dangers of discussing politics at family gatherings, cocktail parties and the workplace. But the rise of Facebook brings about a tempting -- and treacherous -- territory to engage in such commentary.

It takes just a few posts to inadvertently damage a friendship, put a rift in family relations, alienate a oncefriendly neighbor or infurIate a colleague. Mix together a divided country and hot-button political issues and Facebook commentary can become an online landmine. The conventions, as well as debates such as Thursday's duel between Vice President Biden and Republican vice presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan, have prompted Facebook users to argue over topics such as the economy, foreign policy and female reproductive rights. Politics is "one of the most polarizing topics discussed on Facebook," says Ron Schott, a senior strategist at social media marketing agency Spring Creek Group. Yet as divisive as those Facebook comments can be, they can have an influence. One in six social network users say they've changed their views about a political issue after discussing it or reading posts about it on a social networking site, according to a Pew Research Center survey fielded in January and February. As the number of Facebook users expand, the amount of political commentary has followed suit. One in six social media users say they have posted about politics recently, according to Pew. Of the two-thirds who don't post political content, about one-fifth don't do it because they are worried they might upset or offend someone. TMI? (Too Much Information?) During the 2008 presidential race, Facebook had about 100 million users. Now, it has 10 times as many. Facebook doesn't break out U.S. participation, but more than half of Americans use social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+, according to Pew. Those digital ties can expose previously unknown political affiliations. Despite the risks, many Facebook users still talk politics. With Election Day less than a month away, the site is brimming with controversial candidate quotes, provocative headlines and personal commentary. "People get mobilized by the elections and they start posting things they don't usually post," says James Fowler, a University of California-San Diego political science professor who specializes in social network research. Among the reasons political posts are profuse on Facebook:

Political strategists seed the site. Operatives for President Obama and Romney know that Facebook users typically pay more attention to a friend's updates than political ads, so they create evocative content that can quickly go viral, Fowler says. They post quotes, videos and pictures that are "designed to get people's attention," Fowler says. It's easy to spread candidate news as well as personal commentary. With the increased use of tablets and smartphones, Facebook users can disseminate their opinions at any place at any time. Facebook's "share" button makes it simple to recycle content from political parties and like-minded

voters. "You see something and it makes you laugh and you hit the share button and off it goes," Fowler says. "But if you had three seconds (to think about it), maybe you wouldn't have shared it." Users assume others are like-minded. "We think people are more similar to us than they are," Fowler says. So the user spreading the "NoObama" or "Anti-Romney" message assumes that most people in his or her circle agree with that stance, when that isn't necessarily true. "People sharing things on Facebook probably feel safer than they should," he says. "They think that everyone generally agrees with them." There's no in-person accountability. "On Facebook, we share all sorts of stuff that we would never share in normal conversations," says social media expert Schott. At a dinner party or family gathering, users have to defend their position to others who disagree. On Facebook, they can just ignore, or even delete, contrary comments.

How Facebook users think of the site is much different now than during the election race four years ago, says Laura Simpson, global director of McCann Truth Central, the research unit of the McCann Erickson ad agency. In September, McCann Truth Central conducted focus groups and an online survey of 1,000 Americans on topics such as how technology and social media can play a role in politics. "Facebook is evolving into more of a debate space for issues," she says. "Before, it was a much more personal record, or archive, of your social life. Now, there are (updates about) weddings and babies, but you'll also see political views and videos about topics that people feel passionate about." And with that shift, users are more apt to jump into controversial conversations, Simpson says. Words as swords Rich McMahon, 60, from Montclair, N.J., has vigorously disputed political statements that were posted on Facebook by someone he's known for 25 years. "He would put up something that I thought was incorrect and I would point out how I thought it was incorrect," says McMahon, who eventually defriended that man on Facebook but remains friendly with him in real life. "We never talked politics face to face," he says. "But when we got into Facebook, it was swords out." Nearly a quarter of Internet users are more likely to voice extreme political views online than in real life, according to the McCann survey. The Facebook user who frequently shares controversial candidate content -- or posts personal commentary - may not realize that those actions can shape how others feel about them, Schott says. For those who rarely socialize with Facebook friends outside the site, "it leads others to make assumptions about them as a person," he says. "When people interact with you in real life three to four times a year, but see your stuff on Facebook a lot more, often that's who you become in their minds." Over-the-top posts can also turn off non-Facebook friends. Those who don't keep tight privacy settings on their profiles can influence the perceptions of snooping managers, potential employers and even prospective dates.

How business professionals respond to provocative posts matters, says marketing consultant Michael Byrnes. He has an extremely conservative client who recently decided to defriend any Facebook friends who made comments supporting Obama. "He just didn't want to be connected to that," says Byrnes, who counseled his client to simply hide those friends' newsfeeds rather than fully severing the Facebook ties. The man didn't take his advice. "It's really going to impact his business over time," Byrnes says. Learn to set boundaries Perlow, a technology expert and blogger who lives in the Fort Lauderdale area, lost a friend to Facebook fighting. He has tinkered with third-party plug-ins that can create word filters on a profile, such as SocialFixer. But he has another idea on how to keep people from getting sucked in when they want to stay on the political sidelines: Facebook should create a way for users to filter their feeds and weed out politically oriented commentary. "I kind of think of Facebook as a no-nastiness zone, and I don't want to see tons and tons of political objectives," he says. "I'd rather see a picture of someone's cat or their kids or what they did today, rather than (posts of) 'Oh my God, look at all the horrible things that are going to happen if Romney becomes president or if Obama becomes president.' " Until that time comes, Schott suggests that those who want to limit the political discourse go to Facebook's settings section and hide a friend's posts so they don't come up on a newsfeed. "It's not as permanent as unfriending person, so you're not insulting them by unfollowing them," he says. "You can hide them and then unhide them after election season when they are talking about something else." Jerry White of San Leandro, Calif., took a more proactive stance. He upset some friends when he weighed in on political topics. At the same time, he noticed politically oriented remarks on Facebook that were "mean, negative and untrue." He saw posts that baited others, as well as criticisms that seemed trivial, such as disparaging comments about the vegan sloppy Joes that Michelle Obama served children at a White House luncheon. "Finally, I just said that I've had enough," says White, 50. "Facebook is supposed to be fun, and I don't enjoy getting into arguments with people. I'm not changing my opinion and I'm not changing their opinion." He opted out of the political commentary. "I am turning over a new leaf," was his Aug. 21 status update. "No political posts on my wall and no comments on other people's political posts (except maybe a like.)" Instead, he said he would focus on "family, motorcycles, and fun stuff." He didn't defriend those who took to the public pulpit but hid the updates of overzealous political posters. His public statement earned him 34 "likes" from his friends, he says.

"Now my life on Facebook is so much nicer." New York Times: Campaigns Mine Personal Lives to Get Out Vote http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/us/politics/campaigns-mine-personal-lives-to-get-outvote.html?pagewanted=all Charles Duhigg October 13, 2012 Strategists affiliated with the Obama and Romney campaigns say they have access to information about the personal lives of voters at a scale never before imagined. And they are using that data to try to influence voting habits in effect, to train voters to go to the polls through subtle cues, rewards and threats in a manner akin to the marketing efforts of credit card companies and big-box retailers. In the weeks before Election Day, millions of voters will hear from callers with surprisingly detailed knowledge of their lives. These callers friends of friends or long-lost work colleagues will identify themselves as volunteers for the campaigns or independent political groups. The callers will be guided by scripts and call lists compiled by people or computers with access to details like whether voters may have visited pornography Web sites, have homes in foreclosure, are more prone to drink Michelob Ultra than Corona or have gay friends or enjoy expensive vacations. The callers are likely to ask detailed questions about how the voters plan to spend Election Day, according to professionals with both presidential campaigns. What time will they vote? What route will they drive to the polls? Simply asking such questions, experiments show, is likely to increase turnout. After these conversations, when those targeted voters open their mailboxes or check their Facebook profiles, they may find that someone has divulged specifics about how frequently they and their neighbors have voted in the past. Calling out people for not voting, what experts term public shaming, can prod someone to cast a ballot. Even as campaigns embrace this ability to know so much more about voters, they recognize the risks associated with intruding into the lives of people who have long expected that the privacy of the voting booth extends to their homes. You dont want your analytical efforts to be obvious because voters get creeped out, said a Romney campaign official who was not authorized to speak to a reporter. A lot of what were doing is behind the scenes. In statements, both campaigns emphasized their dedication to voters privacy. We are committed to protecting individual privacy at every turn adhering to industry best practices on privacy and going above and beyond whats required by law, said Adam Fetcher, an Obama campaign spokesman. Ryan Williams, a spokesman for the Romney campaign, said: The Romney campaign respects the privacy rights of all Americans. We are committed to ensuring that all of our voter outreach is governed by the highest ethical standards.

In interviews, however, consultants to both campaigns said they had bought demographic data from companies that study details like voters shopping histories, gambling tendencies, interest in get-rich-quick schemes, dating preferences and financial problems. The campaigns themselves, according to campaign employees, have examined voters online exchanges and social networks to see what they care about and whom they know. They have also authorized tests to see if, say, a phone call from a distant cousin or a new friend would be more likely to prompt the urge to cast a ballot. The campaigns have planted software known as cookies on voters computers to see if they frequent evangelical or erotic Web sites for clues to their moral perspectives. Voters who visit religious Web sites might be greeted with religion-friendly messages when they return to mittromney.com or barackobama.com. The campaigns consultants have run experiments to determine if embarrassing someone for not voting by sending letters to their neighbors or posting their voting histories online is effective. Ive had half-a-dozen conversations with third parties who are wondering if this is the year to start shaming, said one consultant who works closely with Democratic organizations. Obama cant do it. But the super PACs are anonymous. They dont have to put anything on the flier to let the voter know who to blame. While the campaigns say they do not buy data that they consider intrusive, the Democratic and Republican National Committees combined have spent at least $13 million this year on data acquisition and related services. The parties have paid companies like Acxiom, Experian or Equifax, which are currently subjects of Congressional scrutiny over privacy concerns. Vendors affiliated with the presidential campaigns or the parties said in interviews that their businesses had bought data from Rapleaf or Intelius, companies that have been sued over alleged privacy or consumer protection violations. Officials at both campaigns say the most insightful data remains the basics: a voters party affiliation, voting history, basic information like age and race, and preferences gleaned from one-on-one conversations with volunteers. But more subtle data mining has helped the Obama campaign learn that their supporters often eat at Red Lobster, shop at Burlington Coat Factory and listen to smooth jazz. Romney backers are more likely to drink Samuel Adams beer, eat at Olive Garden and watch college football. The preoccupation with influencing voters habits stems from the fact that many close elections were ultimately decided by people who almost did not vote. Each campaign has identified millions of lowpropensity voters. Persuading such voters is difficult, political professionals say, because direct appeals have already failed. So campaigns must enlist more subtle methods. In particular, according to campaign officials from both parties, two tactics will be employed this year for the first time in a widespread manner. The first builds upon research into the power of social habits. The Obama and Romney campaigns, as well as affiliated groups, have asked their supporters to provide access to their profiles on Facebook and other social networks to chart connections to low-propensity voters in battleground states like Colorado, North Carolina and Ohio. When one union volunteer in Ohio recently visited the A.F.L.-C.I.O.s election Web site, for instance, she was asked to log on with her Facebook profile. Computers quickly crawled through her list of friends, compared it to voter data files and suggested a work colleague to contact in Columbus. She had never spoken to the

suggested person about politics, and he told her that he did not usually vote because he did not see the point. We talked about how if you dont vote, youre letting other people make choices for you, said the union volunteer, Nicole Rigano, a grocery store employee. He said he had never thought about it like that, and hes going to vote this year. It made a big difference to know ahead of time what we have in common. Its natural to trust someone when you already have a connection to them. Another tactic that will be used this year, political operatives say, is asking voters whether they plan to walk or drive to the polls, what time of day they will vote and what they plan to do afterward. The answers themselves are unimportant. Rather, simply forcing voters to think through the logistics of voting has been shown, in multiple experiments, to increase the odds that someone will actually cast a ballot. Voting is habit-forming, said David W. Nickerson, a professor at the University of Notre Dame and a coauthor of a study of such tactics. Dr. Nickerson is currently engaged in electoral work, though he would not specify for which campaigns or party. When someone is asked to form a mental image of the act of voting, it helps trigger that habit. It is difficult to gauge which campaign is using data more effectively. Though both parties use similar data sets, the Obama campaign and the Democratic Party conduct most analysis and experiments in house and have drawn on a deep pool of data from four years ago. The Romney campaign, by contrast, has relied on outside analytic firms and has focused more on using data to create persuasive messages and slightly less on pushing voters to the polls. Officials for both campaigns acknowledge that many of their consultants and vendors draw data from an array of sources including some the campaigns themselves have not fully scrutinized. And as the race enters its final month, campaign officials increasingly sound like executives from retailers like Target and credit card companies like Capital One, both of which extensively use data to model customers habits. Target anticipates your habits, which direction you automatically turn when you walk through the doors, what you automatically put in your shopping cart, said Rich Beeson, Mr. Romneys political director. Were doing the same thing with how people vote. Mother Jones: Mitt Romney Probably Didnt Hack Your Facebook Page http://m.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/10/mitt-romney-fraudulent-facebook-likes Erika Eichelberger October 10, 2012 It is not just conservatives who have been forced to like Mitt Romney. In recent weeks, a host of liberal types have complained that their Facebook accounts have erroneously "liked" Romney's page, and some are floating the theory (see here and here and here) that the Romney campaign has deployed a virus or used other nefarious means to inflate the candidate's online stature. This conspiratorial notion has spawned a Facebook community forum, and its own page: "Hacked by Mitt Romney" (cute url: facebook.com/MittYouDidntBuildThat), which has over 200 likes. It even inspired an editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which pondered: "Was I the victim of sabotage (like the time one of our kids swiped about 100 campaign signs and posted them all in our front yard)? Or the victim of my own keyboard clumsiness?"

Romney's social-media presence has been associated with some tech trickery in the past. After all, there was that whole thing back in July, when Romney's Twitter followers spiked an improbable 17 percent in one day. (Analysts decided a huge number of the new followers were fake, but couldn't determine their origin.) But is there any credence to claims the Romney campaign is hacking Facebook? After chatting with some of the afflicted, some hacker types, and a Facebook rep, it looks like this issue is largely a result of Facebook's mobile interface kind of sucking. Bill Pennington, an internet security expert, suggested the phantom likes could be the result of "clickjacking," in this case hiding a Romney ad behind an unrelated ad, which would result in a Romney like. But he said the only way to determine who was behind those likes would be for Facebook to investigate its database. So we asked the social-networking company to do that. Facebook agreed, and had a team research the issue. They concluded that users are probably liking the Romney page on a mobile device by either accidentally clicking on a Romney ad or a "sponsored story" from the Romney campaign in their news feed. Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said the issue is unique to mobile because of the way the app works on small screens, and rejected the idea that the Romney camp was engaging in clickjacking. He added that the company is currently working to clean up its mobile interface. (The Obama camp is reportedly experiencing Facebook funny business too. On Tuesday, Buzzfeed noted the president's page saw an odd spike in likes.) It's possible that some of the Romney likes could still be fraudulent. As PCWorld noted, Facebook "is still gamed: users can be tricked into liking something, malicious software can be used to infiltrate accounts and other scammers have set up businesses selling 'Likes' in bulk in violation of Facebook's terms of service." In response to general annoyance over this trend, Facebook announced in late August it would crack down on fake likes, saying in a statement: "We have recently increased our automated efforts to remove Likes on Pages that may have been gained by means that violate our Facebook Terms." So, unless some more compelling evidence surfaces, let's file this under Hankygate. POLITICO: Obama Campaign Pushes Voter Registration on Facebook http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/10/obama-campaign-pushes-voter-registration-on-facebook137841.html Byron Tau October 8, 2012 The Obama campaign is using Facebook to make sure supporters are registered to vote. The data gurus in Chicago are using the social network to encourage voter registration with an app that can check voter registration status and allows users to "nudge" friends and acquaintances to check their own statuses. The app promoted by email to voters in specific states where voter registration deadlines are approaching fast allows users to check their own registration status using Facebook. Voter registration is generally a matter of public record. The Obama campaign uses the simple biographical information most users provide to Facebook to check their registration status in the public records. Once the app confirms a user is registered to vote, it offers to contact twelve of that user's friends to remind them to vote. The users the app suggests are specifically targeted by the campaign.

"It sorts a few ways, including by state for example," a campaign official told POLITICO. It's a 21st century version of a campaign experiment chronicled in Sasha Issenberg's "The Victory Lab." A group of political scientists sent voters a copy of their own voting history, along with the voting histories of their neighbors, and threatened to repeat the mailing after the election. Among voters that received the mailer, turnout was up 20 percent. Issenberg reports that consultants at the Analyst Institute a labor-funded consulting firm that works with the Obama campaign figured out how to turn that experiment into a gentler, less threatening form of persuasion that thanked people for voting in the past rather than threatening to out them as nonvoters in the future. Another study published in Nature estimated that a single Facebook message was responsible for almost a third of a million voters on election day in 2010. The experiment showed some users a list of their friends who had already reported voting. Those users were more likely to turn out and vote. The Obama campaign's Facebook efforts are similar using network effects and gentle reminders from a peer to prod likely supporters into registering and turning out to vote. UPDATE: The RNC has a similar Facebook tool that fills out a voter registration form for the user, and allows them to mail it in. It also tells voters how many voters the RNC has registered in a given state and asks them to invite their friends. It's a slightly different approach to the same issue how to ensure that supporters are prepared for election day. Honolulu Civil Beat: Hawaii Campaigning in the 21 st Century http://www.civilbeat.com/articles/2012/10/08/17310-hawaii-campaigning-in-the-21st-century/ Michael Levine October 8, 2012 WASHINGTON It used to be that if a candidate wanted to ask for votes, one efficient way to do it was to pay for advertising in the newspaper, where many would see it. Or maybe they'd give a stump speech to a large crowd. Or they'd share their ideas during a televised or radio-broadcast debate. While those 20th Century approaches still dominate, 21st Century technology has made it possible for campaigns to ask for votes one at a time, and tweak their sales pitch to fit many specific, niche audiences. Targeted advertising from Internet behemoths like Facebook and Google is in some ways a return to the retail politicking that was the norm before the ascent of mass media. And it's making its way to Hawaii. Example: Former Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle's campaign for U.S. Senate has been built on the idea that she's politically moderate, able to work across the aisle and a viable choice for Democrats who are planning to vote for President Barack Obama's re-election. Lingle's made that pitch in a variety of ways, including a much-maligned commercial originally titled "Democrats For Lingle." Now she's taken her case online. And rather than using testimonials from public figures who may or may not really be Democrats, she's enlisting endorsements from your friends and family to show you she's not a crazy mainland Republican.

That's what happened to Aaron Landry, who was surfing on Facebook and saw a sponsored ad on the right side telling him to join his big-D Democratic friends supporting Lingle's campaign. That the ad uses "Democratic" instead of "Democrat" is evidence that Dems are the intended target audience. The spot was personalized even further for Landry with a blue thumbs up below Lingle's photo with the text "Ryan K. Hew likes this." (A screenshot of the ad, provided to Civil Beat by Landry, sits atop this article.) Micro-targeting campaigns on social media services are part of Landry's day job as a director of market engagement for Olomana Loomis ISC. The firm advised Democrat Neil Abercrombie during his run for governor in 2010 and is advising Honolulu mayoral candidate Kirk Caldwell this year, though Landry said he's not involved with that effort. "Being able to target people on Facebook and being able to look at these are people in this age demographic, these are people interested in X, Y and Z, it's an opportunity for the campaign to target niche markets," Landry said in an interview last week. "It seems like most of the ads that Lingle's doing are designed to make people click 'Like,'" he said. "It's smart, and it's something we do too. We do 'Like' campaigns, and target people who have a friend who already 'Like' us. They don't even have to go to the page to click 'Like.'" What's the benefit of having more people like you on Facebook? "You can obviously market saying that 'We have three times as many Facebook likes as our opponent,' but the other piece of it is that you have 7,000, 8,000 pepole that when they open up their Facebook and look at their newsfeed, the chances of them seeing something from the Linda Lingle campaign is much higher," Landry said. "It's basically building affinity and building an audience for later messaging." The Ryan K. Hew Facebook page referenced in the advertisement served to Landry is actually not Hew's personal page but instead the one for his law practice. Hew told Civil Beat that his decision to like Lingle's campaign page shouldn't be taken as an endorsement of her candidacy. "I just follow every candidate's page," he said in an interview. "As that legal entity or that business, I go and like a lot of business and political campaigns as a way to learn and share information." Hew understands why Lingle's ad did what it did he's got a lot of Democratic friends and has worked in politics before. But he doesn't appreciate being used that way. "Them targeting me and using me in that way, I probably would tell them that I'd have to unlike their page if they continue to do that type of thing, because it's me as my professional self," he said. "It's a very interesting kind of, 'How does all this new media work with traditional campaigning and what are the acceptable boundaries?'" Micro-Targeting, Retail and Politics Lingle's Facebook ad is really just the tip of the iceberg. She's got others, as does Democratic opponent Mazie Hirono. Political campaigns aren't the only organizations following users around and using their browsing and purchase histories to their advantage. Slate technology journalist Farhad Manjoo wrote in August about the

"creepy" targeted ads that followed him from site to site after he considered, and then decided against, buying clothes from one retailer. "Today's Web ads don't know enough about you to avoid pitching you stuff that you'd never, ever buy," Manjoo wrote. "They do know just enough about you, though, to clue you in on the fact that they're watching everything you do." The surveillance doesn't even stop at the end of your computer's power cord. Mega-retailer Target (and many other stores) send you coupons and special offers based on your shopping history, and can even know what's happening in your life before family members do. Charles Duhigg shared this anecdote in a February article in the New York Times Magazine titled "How Companies Learn Your Secrets." About a year after (Target statistician Andrew) Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation. "My daughter got this in the mail!" he said. "She's still in high school, and you're sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?" The manager didn't have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man's daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again. On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. "I had a talk with my daughter," he said. "It turns out there's been some activities in my house I haven't been completely aware of. She's due in August. I owe you an apology." Purchases that could have tipped off Target's algorithm? Cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. And once they hook a new mother with special one-time offers, she's likely to continue shopping for clothing and food and other supplies for her children for years. Political campaigns aren't selling you maternity clothing, but they are selling you a candidate. Journalist Sasha Issenberg's new book "The Victory Lab" looks at what he terms a scientific revolution in political campaigns. In an interview on PBS' Newshour, Issenberg says modern campaigns maintain huge databases to track not just if voters actually vote, but their past interactions with campaigns, their credit histories and even warranty forms or magazine subscriptions. "A lot of it is first gathered by people who are creating credit ratings," Issenberg said. "They obviously want to know as much about you as possible and develop predictions. What has happened in the political world is people are doing statistical models with the same goal. So, instead of predicting whether you are likely to default on your loan or pay off your bill on time or run up $500 on your credit card in a given month, they're trying to predict how likely are you to vote in November, who are you likely to vote for, what issues are you likely to care about."

The campaigns have also taken steps to add to those databases directly by soliciting small donations that do little to fund billion-dollar campaign operations but come with valuable troves of personal information. "The money is not peanuts, but the email address and information is worth much more than the few bucks," Michael Malbin, executive director of the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute, told Politico recently. Ultimately, campaigns separate voters into distinct pots. These groups include those who are likely to vote, but can be convinced to change their choice; those that are likely to support the preferred candidate, but may not turn out; and those who are likely to support the opponent, but may be convinced to stay home. These groups are served specific messaging designed to get them to move in a desired direction. People who have been determined to have already made up their minds are left alone. To target them with further messaging would be a waste of time, effort and, most importantly, money. Micro-Targeting and the Media The new paradigm provides a challenge to the news media that has traditionally served as a filter for campaign messaging and as a watchdog to make sure voters aren't being sold a phony product. Issenberg, writing for the New York Times last month, says political journalists have fallen behind the curve and can no longer keep up with how modern campaigns are actually carried out. Over the last decade, almost entirely out of view, campaigns have modernized their techniques in such a way that nearly every member of the political press now lacks the specialized expertise to interpret what's going on. Campaign professionals have developed a new conceptual framework for understanding what moves votes. It's as if restaurant critics remained oblivious to a generation's worth of new chefs' tools and techniques and persisted in describing every dish that came out of the kitchen as either "grilled" or "broiled." Mashable this month launched a project it's calling "Politics Transformed: The High Tech Battle For Your Vote," complete with a mechanized donkey and elephant doing hoof-to-trunk combat. Initial coverage areas include how targeted advertising could save campaigns millions of dollars; the data campaigns have collected about you; and the importance of social media in both voter turnout and local politics. One local example of media still trying to keep up with 20th Century politicking is Civil Beat's ongoing series sharing the public files that all television networks need to keep on hand to show how many ads they sell to candidates. That's a public resource that shows how campaigns spend some of their money, but it's not the whole story. Similarly, on a national level, fact-checking organizations have focused their energy on public statements in television commercials, stump speeches and debates and not on small-scale communications like microtargeted advertisements or campaign emails. In a panel at the National Press Club in Washington last month titled "The Role of Journalism In Debunking Deception and Holding Campaigns and Donors Accountable," PolitiFact creator and editor Bill Adair said simply that "You don't know about the ads you didn't see." "I think our challenge is to find out what those messages are," Adair said. "If the campaigns are using social media in very targeted ways, it's not being seen by us. ... That's an aspect where I think we can build a crowdsourcing network that highlights those things."

Public interest journalism nonprofit ProPublica is trying to change that by asking readers to share the personalized emails they receive from campaigns. The project, called Message Machine, has the stated goal of tracking the subtle differences between the messages and cross-referencing them with the recipients' demographic profiles to "reverse engineer the 2012 campaign." So far, about 2,000 emails have been submitted, according to ProPublica's website. FactCheck.org has also asked readers to help round up examples of targeted mailings, robo-calls and emails with limited success. FactCheck.org Director Brooks Jackson said at the National Press Club panel that the campaigns aren't sending all of those things to reporters. "It's not like they're putting it on a television station where it can be monitored, and where we can see every ad that goes up," Jackson said. "We're pretty good on screening the TV ads, but there is a huge potential for flying under the radar and telling targeted groups of voters things that aren't true." Jackson said targeted mailers really flood in during the final weeks of the campaign, which "makes it very, very difficult for us to parse through all this stuff and do any useful pushback before the election." He believes many targeted messages are repetitions of falsehoods that have already been debunked. That means fact-checkers are saved by the "limited imaginations" of those who work for campaigns, he said. But it also means voters are being lied to in the days leading up to the election. Democrats For Lingle Landry made clear that Lingle's Facebook ad didn't work on him. Like Slate writer Manjoo and the clothes he already decided not to purchase, Landry's made up his mind and won't be voting for the former Republican governor. "They sent me an ad that kind of pisses me off, so I don't think they're doing very good in terms of targeting," Landry said. But that doesn't mean the approach won't work on others. "For all the people who are less engaged than someone like you or I, that are just going to peripherally see that they have friends who might be left-leaning, they're going to get a message that people who aren't Republicans are going to support Lingle," Landry said. "As crass as it is, I think it's smart maneuvering. If you don't actually care about offending all of these actual Democrats who aren't going to vote for Linda Lingle, if you don't care about them, and you want to utilize them to convince Barack Obama voters or Democraticleaning voters, then it's smart. But it's really bothersome." New York Times: Campaigns Use Social Media to Lure in Younger Voters http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/campaigns-use-social-media-to-lure-youngervoters.html?_r=1 Jenna Wortham October 7, 2012 In 2012, it is not enough for candidates to shake some hands, kiss a baby or two and run some TV ads. They also need to be posting funny little animations on the blogging site Tumblr.

If the presidential campaigns of 2008 were dipping a toe into social media like Facebook and Twitter, their 2012 versions are well into the deep end. They are taking to fields of online battle that might seem obscure to the non-Internet-obsessed sharing song playlists on Spotify, adding frosted pumpkin bread recipes to Pinterest and posting the candidates moments at home with the children on Instagram. At stake, the campaigns say they believe, are votes from citizens, particularly younger ones, who may not watch television or read the paper but spend plenty of time on the social Web. The campaigns want to inject themselves into the conversation on services like Tumblr, where political dialogue often takes the form of remixed photos and quirky videos. To remind Tumblr users about the first presidential debate on Wednesday, Mr. Obamas team used an obscure clip of Lindsay Lohan saying Its October 3 in the comedy Mean Girls. And on Twitter, Mitt Romneys bodyguard posted a picture of the candidates family playing Jenga before the debate. The techniques may be relatively new, but they are based on some old-fashioned political principles, according to Zachary Moffatt, the digital director for the Romney campaign. The more people you talk to, the more likely you are to win, said Mr. Moffatt, who oversees about 120 staff members and volunteers. The more people who interact with Mitt, the more likely he is to win. Social extends and amplifies that. But as is the way of the Web, a well-intended post or picture on social networks can quickly morph into a disaster. And the slightest gaffe on the campaign trail can become a Groundhog Day moment, repeated endlessly. Even a typo is a big deal, Mr. Moffatt said. In July, when Mr. Obama told a crowd of supporters You didnt build that while talking about the importance of public infrastructure, the Romney campaign pounced, uploading photos of hot-dog-joint owners and others displaying signs with variations on the slogan I built this. And Clint Eastwoods mock interview with the president at the Republican convention sent the Web into a frenzy. Within minutes, images of Mr. Eastwood on stage, plastered with cutting captions, hit Tumblr, and Twitter was flooded with parodies. Mr. Obamas team joined in, sharing on Twitter a photo of him in a chair marked The President, with the caption, This seats taken. That retort is in line with the overall social media presence of the Obama campaign, which tends to be sharper and more attitude-laden than the Republican efforts, particularly on Tumblr. The morning after the debate, the Obama Tumblr followed up on Mr. Romneys reference to cutting financing for PBS by posting something that was circulating on Twitter: a picture of Big Bird from Sesame Street with the caption Mitt Romneys Plan to Cut the Deficit: Fire This Guy. (Laura Olin, who previously worked at a digital strategy agency, helps lend a savvy tone to the campaigns Tumblr efforts.) Both camps tend to rely heavily on photos, slogans and the like that have been generated by their supporters. The Obama team, in particular, is fond of posting GIFs, or short looping video clips, that have been made by others. These might show the president high-fiving children or hugging his wife and daughters. Other clips poke fun at rivals or give knowing nods to hip television shows like Parks and Recreation.

At times the campaigns freer-wheeling tone can get it into trouble: an image it shared on Tumblr that urged followers to vote like your lady parts depend on it drew criticism from conservative bloggers and others who thought it was in poor taste. The campaign quickly took down the image, saying it had not been properly vetted. Those who keep up with the Obama campaign on Tumblr seem to approve of the approach with some posts attracting close to 70,000 notes, or likes and reposts from users. Its about authentic, two-way communication, said Adam Fetcher, deputy press secretary for the Obama campaign. Social media is a natural extension of our massive grass-roots organization. By comparison, the Romney campaigns presence on Tumblr is more subdued, sticking largely to posterlike photos with slogans like No, we cant. Its posts rarely get more than 400 responses. Both campaigns have teams of Internet-adept staff members who try to coordinate their strategy and message across many social sites. They declined to specify how this works, saying they did not want to tip off the competition. But both rely heavily on Facebook and Twitter to solicit donations, blast out reminders of events and share articles and videos conveying their stances. Flickr and Instagram serve as scrapbooks from the campaign trail, showing the candidates trying the pie at small-town restaurants. On Tumblr and Pinterest, the campaigns often highlight photos and other material from supporters. As important as the campaigns say these efforts are, the candidates themselves are not actually doing the posting. But sometimes their wives are. While Mr. Romney has a campaign-run Pinterest board, his wife, Ann, has her own, showcasing her favorite crafts projects and books. When Michelle Obama posts a message on Twitter or shares an image on the campaigns Pinterest board, her posts bear her initials mo so they stand out among those generated by campaign staff. Twitter and Facebook are still the biggest avenues for online canvassing, with their broad demographic reach and user numbers that have grown tenfold from four years ago. It may be hard to fathom what posting video clips or music playlists on less mainstream sites has to do with the election. Does it really matter to voters if Mr. Obama has Stevie Wonder on his list, while Mr. Romney prefers Johnny Cash? Though the returns on such efforts are not easily quantifiable, neither party is taking any chances. Whats the return on putting your pants on in the morning? We dont know, said Jan Rezab, the chief executive of Socialbakers, a social media analytics firm. But we just know its bad if you dont do it. Coye Cheshire, an associate professor at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley, pointed to another motivation for such seemingly trivial online updates. It is important for people to know whether or not a huge political figure shares the same taste as me, said Dr. Cheshire, who studies behavior and trust online. And creating a playlist on Spotify is part of what makes them seem more human. Fox News: Social media weighs in on 2012 presidential debate http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2012/10/04/social-media-weighs-in-on-2012-presidential-debate/ AP

October 4, 2012 Big Bird is endangered. Jim Lehrer lost control. And Mitt Romney crushed President Barack Obama. Those were the judgments rendered across Twitter and Facebook Wednesday during the first debate of the 2012 presidential contest. While millions turned on their televisions to watch the 90-minute showdown, a smaller but highly engaged subset took to social networks to discuss and score the debate as it unspooled in real time. Until recently, debate watchers would have waited through the entire broadcast to hear analysis and reaction from a small cadre of television pundits. Social media has democratized the commentary, giving voice to a far wider range of participants who can shape the narrative long before the candidates reach their closing statements. "People still use old media to watch the debates, but they use social networks and other new media to have influence, voice opinions and be involved," said Scott Talan, an assistant professor of communication at American University who studies social media and politics. "Old media is not dead; it's growing. But now we have more people involved and engaged because of digital means." The political conversation plays out across a range of social platforms, especially on the industry giant Facebook and on Twitter, the social networking hub where opinions are shared through 140-character comments known as tweets. Reflecting the changing times, many television analysts now monitor Twitter and Facebook feeds and use information gleaned from those platforms to inform their punditry. 'People use social networks to have influence, voice opinions and be involved.' - Scott Talan, an assistant professor of communication at American University Twitter announced shortly after Wednesday's debate that it had been the most tweeted event in U.S. political history, topping this year's Republican and Democratic National Conventions. With 11.1 million comments, Wednesday's debate was the fourth most tweeted telecast of any kind, coming in just behind the most recent Grammy awards, MTV's Video Music Awards and the Super Bowl, according to William Powers, director of the Crowdwire, an election project of the social analytics firm Bluefin Labs. The project found 55 percent of the social comments about the debate were made by women, 45 percent by men. Unlike the wider viewing audience, debate watchers who comment on social media "are politically engaged in the strongest possible way," Powers said. But, he added, "it's a bit of a hothouse population. It does skew younger, and I'm not sure how much middle America is represented." Twitter scored Romney the debate's clear winner according to Peoplebrowsr, a web analytics firm. The group found 47,141 tweets mentioning Romney and "win or winner" compared to just 29,677 mentioning Obama and "win or winner." Romney was also the top tweet in battleground states including Florida, Ohio, Nevada and Colorado, Peoplebrowsr found. In Ohio, a key swing state where polls show Obama has emerged with a lead in recent weeks, the top two debate tweets were "Romney" with 15,115 and "Mitt" with 5,446. "Obama" placed third with 5,328.

Search engine Google announced the debate's four most searched terms: Simpson-Bowles (the bipartisan fiscal commission Obama appointed); Dodd-Frank (a democratic-backed financial reform law); Who is Winning the Debate; and Big Bird. The debate, focused on domestic issues, was a numbers-heavy discussion of the economy, debt and entitlement reform. It produced strong reactions on Twitter from its earliest moments, from the candidates' attire and appearance - "Obama: solid blue tie with dimple. Romney: red tie with stripes, no dimple," tweeted publisher Arianna Huffington - to Jenga, a stacking game Romney and his wife, Ann, were reportedly playing with their grandchildren before the debate began. From there, the social chatter settled into a few major themes. - Big Bird. Early in the debate, Romney said he would defund public broadcasting to bring down the deficit but added that he liked Big Bird, a popular character on PBS' "Sesame Street." Social networks immediately responded, with participants posting spoof photos of Big Bird and other "Sesame Street" characters on Facebook and setting up parody Big Bird Twitter accounts. During a lull in the debate, an ABC news executive tweeted, "avian life is outstripping human life in this debate." - Jim Lehrer. The veteran PBS newsman was widely panned as the debate moderator on social media, with viewers complaining he asked weak questions and did a poor job of keeping command of the debate's time and tempo. Lehrer's name became a trending topic on Twitter, and his performance drew jeers from countless participants. "Jim Lehrer is like the grandpa at dinner table who falls asleep and wakes up randomly shouting," tweeted a woman with the Twitter handle of Bookgirl96. - Romney's big win. Social media participants marveled at Romney's strong outing and pronounced Obama's debate performance flat, non-energetic and meandering - a dud. While Obama has been leading Romney in battleground state polls in recent days, the consensus on social networks was that Romney's debate performance had breathed new life into his campaign. Obama supporters were some of his toughest critics. Andrew Sullivan, a pro-Obama writer for the Daily Beast whose Twitter feed, Sullydish, has a loyal following, declared, "This was a disaster for the president." Joe Mercurio, a New York media buyer, wrote on Facebook, "It could have been worse." Mashable: Social Media is the Secret Weapon in Local Politics http://mashable.com/2012/10/02/social-media-and-local-politics/ Anne Nelson October 2, 2012 Social media first took the national spotlight in the 2008 elections, and it continues to expand its influence at every level of American politics. And just as a youthful John F. Kennedy benefited from his grasp of television in the 1960 elections, a new generation of local politicians is using its tactical advantage as digital natives to woo the electorate and launch open government initiatives. Consider Alex Torpey, the 25-year-old mayor of South Orange, N.J. (official title, Village President). Torpeys Twitter profile describes him as Mayor of @southorangenj; philosopher; grad student; founder/partner @veracitymedia; OpenGov advocate; volunteer EMT; writer; musician; person. Unlike older public officials, Torpeys social media involvement preceded his political career, as an undergraduate at Hampshire College. I started using Facebook in college in 2005, he says. Theres an

interesting thing happening with people under 25 or 30 who started using social media personally and now start using it professionally. Torpey has found a surprising amount of support in South Orange, a prosperous New York suburb of population 20,000. When he ran for office in 2011, he saw his social media platforms as an alternative to paid ads and has continued to experiment on multiple networks. I have both a Facebook personal page and a fan page. I started the fan page during the election, but found it didnt meet my needs. People were basically split between the two, and I had to choose between them - I wanted to be able to send messages. However, Torpey feels that Facebook has been slow to adapt to the needs of the political process. Youre not supposed to friend people you dont know. But if Im mayor of a town and sending a message out to the people in the town, its counted as spam. Torpey has gotten better responses on Facebook than on Twitter because, he believes, its easier to see other people commenting on something. Last year when we had all these crazy storms, there were some residents who had power out for a week, and my Facebook page became a hub of information for people who had power out. Torpey is on a fast (and well-informed) learning curve. For example, he is unusual among local politicians in having his own YouTube channel. People really like videos, he reports. People will turn the video on and start making dinner. Torpey also deploys Instagram to promote local events and Foursquare to announce his whereabouts to constituents. Hes exploring crisis mapping platforms to initiate SeeClickFix for municipal services, and hes interested in trying Localocracy.com, a means to promote voter registration and engagement among the young. Hes most excited about his townships open data initiatives. Whereas the town was accustomed to five or seven people showing up for budget meetings, Torpey says, Weve had a couple hundred people take a look at our budget online. This allows him to answer direct questions about how tax money is being spent. When I sent the explanation of how things fit together, they said I want to get involved and make the town better. Torpeys findings are born out by a recent study from Brock University analyzing the use of social media in the 2010 Niagara (Ontario) municipal election. Although the local candidates used an array of social media in their campaigns, most of it had a billboard function (as in Support Me from the candidate and I Support You from the voters). Most candidates failed to stimulate genuine interaction. The study concluded that social media did not have a significant impact on the electoral success of the candidates, adding that candidates will need to realize how social media differs from the news-release, one-directional type of communication used in mass media, flyers and most websites. One of the best-known figures in U.S. political social media is Corey Booker, mayor of Newark, N.J. As of September 2012, Booker had earned an astonishing 1.2 million followers on Twitter. A recent post on Proof Brandings marketing blog listed reasons for Bookers success, which include his hyper-local (and hyper-interactive) sensibility:

In July 2012, Booker announced that he had raised $1.75 million in funding for #waywire, described as, a social artery for video news, inspiration and leading voices. (Other backers include Googles executive chairman Eric Schmidt.) #Waywire, which has only been operational for a matter of weeks, has also been dubbed a Pinterest for video, in which subscribers post and comment on videos linked to their other social media accounts. One of the earliest products is a video series in which Corey Booker and Congressman Aaron Schock (R-Ill) respectively stand in as surrogates for their parties presidential candidates. In the past, people would have resisted the idea of an elected official founding a news organization that covers himself. But the brave new world of political social media has blurred many of these lines. (Think Michael Bloomberg, Bloomberg news and Bloomberg Government.) One analyst who is watching this space closely is Micah Sifry, co-founder and editor of the Personal Democracy Forum. But he admits that the social media usage of local officials is difficult to track. Weve got 100,000 elected local offices, without the resources to look at them. One issue he signals is the problem of the campaign feed morphing into the official. Many candidates create Facebook and Twitter feeds for their campaigns. Once these are established and the candidates are elected, they often segue straight into platforms to address constituents. This would not have been a possibility in the days of old media, when there was no way for paid political advertisements to morph into platforms for office holders. There are rules against this, Sifry points out. Youre not supposed to use campaign resources for office resources. But no one is monitoring it. Sifry believes that most local office holders have rapidly learned how to use social media with more sophistication, out of necessity. You dont have as many interns managing the feeds any more. Lots of local officials like being in charge of their accounts - theres a freedom and directness they enjoy. He sees most local officials focusing on the trifecta of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, although some are toying with Pinterest, since you have greater reach to women with it. At the same time, local politicians have also become aware of social medias risks. This became apparent with New York Congressman Anthony Weiners 2011 sexting scandal, when Weiner tweeted suggestive comments and pictures of himself to a female constituent, costing him his office. The Anthony Weiner case made people a tiny bit smarter about being careful, but not as much as you would think, Sifry notes. You still see staffers accidentally tweeting from their bosss account. Thats not as bad as what Anthony Weiner did, but you definitely have slippage. No media seems to stop the ability of politicians to be complete idiots. Tweeting politicians were dismayed to learn that the Sunlight Foundation hosts a tool called Politwoops to display deleted tweets, ranging from minor misspellings to many forms of awkward. University of Washington professor Philip Howard (currently a fellow at Princeton) notes some new research on how different politicians approach digital media. Republicans tend to use digital media for coordinating their message, broadcasting out content that has been drafted from senior campaign officials, and policing each others political values, he observes. Democrats tend to use digital media for engagement, conversations, and sometimes slip up because they debate and dont stay on message as well. Professional campaign managers at all levels dislike social media because using it results in some loss of message control. No one should assume that the U.S. has the last word in social media and local politics. A number of new ideas are emerging abroad. In Berlin, the Pirate Party has developed an open source platform called Liquid Democracy, which allows party members to directly collaborate with local officeholders on shaping the party

platform. (Alex Torpey is interested in adapting the model for New Jersey.) In Mexico, visitors to the countrys biggest news portal, Animal Politico, can use a feature called Diputuits, pronounced dipu-tweets, an interactive map of the House of Representatives with links to individuals Twitter feeds. (U.S. Congress tweet aggregator Tweet Congress pales by comparison.) Even Wikipedia looked beyond the U.S. to engage local government with its first hyper-local project. In Monmouth, Wales, the local city council provided early and essential support for the development of their city as the worlds first Wikipedia town. As the 2012 elections approach, its useful to recall that its still the early days of this movement. None of the most influential social networks in question - Facebook, Twitter or YouTube have reached their tenth birthdays, while Pinterest and Foursquare are still in their infancies. As digital natives make their way in the world, social media will continue to overhaul American democracy in new and unexpected ways. Technology Review: The Real Debate Will Take Place on Facebook and Twitter http://www.technologyreview.com/news/429424/the-real-debate-will-take-place-on-facebook-and-twitter/ David Talbot October 2, 2012 When President Obama and Mitt Romney take the stage for their first debate in Denver tomorrow night, a far more extensive shadow debate will unfold across social media. Campaigns and supporters will aim to seize the online conversation in a vast game of spin unfolding well beyond the telecast and media coverage. As a sign of just how pervasive and crucial social media has become, in some states elected officials are only one degree of friend separation from nearly every Facebook account holder in that state, says JD Schlough, a Democratic political strategist. And by one analyst firms count, Twitter has 140 million U.S. users, more than 30 million of whom joined in 2012 alone. All social media is a conversation, but the amount of people having that conversation in 2012 is a lot greater than it was in 2008. That conversation is going to happen whether the campaign influences it or notso they better get their message out there and hold the other side accountable for mistakes, Schlough says. On Thursday morning, a growing crop of analytics firms will drill down to see which momentswhich gaffes, one-liners, and key messagesresonated the most, and which social media influencers did the best job amplifying them (see Facebook: The Real Presidential Swing State). Its likely that more than 50 million people will be watching the action Wednesday at the University of Denver. And whether it was Richard Nixons haggard look in 1960 or Ronald Reagans dismissive There you go again line against Jimmy Carter in 1980, experience shows that a single impression or one-liner can carry or ruin the night for either candidate. This could be especially evident online. During the Republican presidential debates in Iowa last fall, when Mitt Romney made his infamous $10,000 bet with Rick Perry, playing into the stereotype of him as a clueless plutocrat, this spawned some 3,400 tweets. And the Democratic National Committee poured gas on the fire, creating the hashtag #what10Kbuys, which became a trending topic. In terms of his online and mobile presence, the president has a strong advantage. According to figures from Nielsen, BarackObama.com had 6.4 million unique visitors in August 2012, reaching 2.9 percent of Americans

who were online that month. MittRomney.com had 3.3 million unique visitors during that time, about 1.5 percent of the American population online. On mobile, the figures were similar. Obamas official app and mobile website had 1.8 million unique users during August, from Android and iPhone owners in the United States. MittRomney.comwhich includes both mobile apps and Webhad only 881,000 unique U.S. users. On social media platforms highly influential tweeters can make all the difference, and a growing number of firms aim to identify which Twitter members are driving the conversationranking people by followers, frequency of tweeting, and frequency with which their tweets are further distributed. Earlier this year PeopleBrowsr, a San Francisco-based analytics company, analyzed how influencers helped launch public campaign against Chik-Fil-A, the fastfood restaurant whose president drew fire from some quarters for donating to right-wing groups that opposed same-sex marriage. This influence can spill into mainstream media coverage. On July 17, the Chik-Fil-A topic was mostly remarked upon by noncelebrities and a few gay activist groups. The following day the tweets came from journalist David Carr and bloggers and celebrities like Pink and Rob Delaney. The day after that, the mainstream media, including the Guardian, NBC, and AOL, started covering the story. If marketers and political campaigns can determine which influencers have the biggest sway on different topic and in different geographical areas, they can wage campaigns to deliver messages to different interest groups, says Shawn Roberts, marketing director for PeopleBrowsr, which is not itself doing political campaigns. If they can get those influential people talking, those are the folks that will drive opinion, he says. Overall the goal is not just to more broadly deliver a message, but to ensure that it is delivered from trusted friendsthe holy grail of marketing. After all, you are more likely to see a movie when a friend recommends it, rather than if youve seen an advertisement. Thats why campaigns want to use all means possible to prime social media to distribute talking points in real-time. If we know that people believe stuff they hear from friends more than politicians, and one of them does something stupid, or smartor if there is a contrast on an issueit amplifies the impact of the debate to hear and to react and add your own spin, Schlough says. Much like the convention, they will seek to use the social media to capitalize on the good moments and fact-check the hits the other side is throwing. Bluefin Labs, a startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that analyzes social media conversations, has been shepherding a list of 400 to 500 most politically influential people on Twitter, but has not yet done any analytics on them. That may change after the debates. The company plans to analyze shifts in how people are taking about the race, says William Powers, who directs Bluefins The Crowdwire blog. Are they just looking at it as a political race, as a race between celebrities, or are they looking at it as a contest over positions on the issues? Lets face it, the bigger questions are: What are these guys going to do when they have power? The first analytics might be posted Thursday, after the debate, he says. Mother Jones: Inside the Obama Campaigns Hard Drive http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/harper-reed-obama-campaign-microtargeting

Tim Murphy October 2, 2012 DURING THE 736 DAYS beginning May 9, 2010, Harper Reed walked an average of 8,513 steps, reaching a high mark of 26,141 on September 13, 2010, and a low of 110 on April 21 of this year. (His excuse: broken pedometer.) On that day, Reed, age 34.33 as of this writing, sent one tweet, 55 below his average. Reed was traveling from Chicago to Colorado, where he grew up, where he has spent 39.5 percent of his time away from home since 2002, and where, in 1990, he attended his first concert (David Bowie, McNichols Arena, row HH, seat 8). He has read 558 books in three yearsroughly 1,350 pages per week at a cost of 4 cents per page. On May 11, 2011, he slept 14.8 hours before waking up at precisely 2:47 p.m. It was a personal best. FLOWCHART: How Obama for America Gets to Know Jane Q. VoterOn his site, where he describes himself as "pretty awesome," Reed painstakingly tabulates everything from his weight to his exact location. A certifiable hipster with gauged earlobes and an occasionally waxed handlebar mustache that complements his roosterlike crest of red hair, Reed is a veteran of the professional yo-yo circuit, a devotee of death metal, and a cofounder of Jugglers Against Homophobia. As chief technology officer for President Obama's reelection effortresponsible for building the apps and databases that will power the campaign's outreachhe and his team of geeks could provide the edge in a race that's expected to be decided by the narrowest of margins. Over the last year and a half at the campaign's Chicago headquarters, a team of almost 100 data scientists, developers, engineers, analysts, and old-school hackers have been transforming the way politicians acquire dataand what they do with it. They're building a new kind of Chicago machine, one aimed at processing unprecedented amounts of information and leveraging it to generate money, volunteers, and, ultimately, votes. Reed describes his campaign role as making sure technology is a "force multiplier." And that's about as much as he'll say on the matter. The campaign declined to make Reed available for an interview, or to offer anyone who could so much as comment on the complexity of Reed's mustache. "Unfortunately, we do not discuss anything that has to do with our digital strategy," says spokeswoman Katie Hogan. Much of Reed's work now is so under wraps that it's literally code word classifiedObama for America (OFA) uses terms like "Narwhal" and "Dreamcatcher" to describe its high-tech ops. So in the spirit of the sweeping data-mining operation he helped build, I set out to learn as much as I could from Reed's online footprint.

IN APRIL 2011, Reed arrived on the sixth floor of 130 East Randolph Street, the nerve center of the Obama campaign, by way of Chicago's hacker circuit, where he was, by all accounts, a big fucking deal. After studying philosophy and computer science at Iowa's Cornell College, he moved to the Windy City in 2001 and began spearheading dozens of digital projects of varying degrees of seriousness. WeOwntheSun.com, produced with two other future Obama hires, invited visitors to purchase plots of land on the surface of the sun (a steal at $4.95 per square kilometer). Eventually, he ended up at the online T-shirt retailer Threadless. It was there, in a converted Ravenswood Avenue print shop cluttered with go-karts, taxidermy, video games, and a full-size Airstream camper, that Reed, who rose to become the company's chief technology officer, displayed the talents the campaign would later find so valuable. Threadless wasn't the first company to market arty apparel to the Wicker Park set, but its genius lay in its model. Its website functions as a sort of community center, inviting users to submit T-shirt concepts and vote

on their favorites. Out of more than a thousand entries each week, a handful are selected. It's almost impossible for a new T-shirt to flop because the target audience already has declared it a hit. With Reed's help, Threadless built a mini social network and seeded it with just enough incentives to boost its bottom line. Customers are advised on the precise number of shirts left in stock, prompting impulse buys. Profiles display a user's level of involvement in real time. (Reed, for example, "has scored 281 submissions, giving an average score of 3.22, helping 10 designs get printed.") The brilliance of Threadless is that it turned customers into workers, and the work itself into a game. "Before Threadless, I loved users but didn't trust them," Reed told an interviewer in 2009, as he was leaving the company. But now he had no doubt: "Users are king." That faith in the power of crowdsourcing informed his other ventures. In 2008, Reed hacked the Chicago Transit Authority's bus tracker app and made its information public. He also began looking for interesting ways to use it. Although he felt the systemfor all its creaky "urine-soaked" carsby and large worked, he wanted to understand what happened when it failed. Reed used the CTA's data to track every incident, be it a downed power line or a deer on the tracks, and identify trends. Each day's incidents were scored according to severity (low: 4; high: 90; average: 26). Freeing the data earned him an award from the city and face time with the agency. Another tool, a site called CityPayments.org that aggregated information on government contracts in Chicago, led to an official commendation from the White House. Yet aside from volunteering briefly for the Obama campaign in 2008, Reed had shown little interest in political work. His plan post-Threadless was to take some time to experiment, immerse himself in cloud computing (he's taken to calling himself a "nepholologist"a mashup of the term for atmospheric analysts and LOL), and work with other startups. Then Michael Slaby, a veteran of the 2008 campaign who had been appointed chief integration and innovation officer, came calling. When Reed joined OFA, he didn't just bring his own expertise; he got the band back together. The campaign counts at least five Threadless alums among its Chicago tech staff, including Scott VanDenPlas, a selfdescribed futurist who runs the campaign's development operations (a hybrid of programming and IT), and Dylan Richard, the campaign's director of engineering. A sixth Threadless colleague was invited to design the campaign's online store, which borrows the layout and some of the crowdsourcing ethos from the company. Reed's mission is simple but ambitious: Assemble a data-mining infrastructure that allows the campaign to determine which voters to target and how to do it on a scale and scope that's never been seen before. It's part of a new, data-driven shift in the way campaigns are run. Think of it as the smart campaign.

THE USE OF DATA mining as a political tool traces its origins, at least in spirit, to 1897, when, in the aftermath of William Jennings Bryan's first failed run for the White House, his wife, Mary, and brother, Charles, combed through letters from supporters for relevant personal information. They built a database of 200,000 index cards tracking things like a person's religion, income, party affiliation, and occupation. It became the basis for the perennial candidate's lucrativealthough never victoriousdirect-mail operation. Knowing your audience is at the heart of politics, but in the last decade, this precept has taken on a new dimension. Obama's first presidential campaign ushered in a new era of data collection and targeting. The operation's new-media team, which included Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes (now owner and editor in chief of The New Republic), utilized social-media platforms to raise record sums from small donors and organize

supporters. If an Iowa college student joined the Students for Barack Obama Facebook group, the campaign could follow up to ask him to knock on doors too. It also began to look for efficiencies in-house. Dan Siroker, who took a leave of absence from Google to work as director of analytics for the campaign, employed A/B testing to figure out which combination of images, text, and videos were most likely to compel BarackObama.com visitors to reach for their credit cards. (Siroker now provides those services to a vast array of commercial and political clientsincluding Mitt Romney's campaign and Mother Jonesthrough his company, Optimizely.) All told, Siroker estimated A/B testing boosted OFA's fundraising by $100 million, 20 percent of its online haul. But the campaign struggled with integration gaps. When Reed volunteered his services the weekend before Super Tuesday in 2008, he spent most of his time manually entering voter data into spreadsheets. It was important work, but also tedious: Voter information collected online, via the campaign's social-media platform, couldn't be easily synced up with data gathered offline, by canvassers. The campaign could collect information by the terabytethe Obama team, in fact, expanded the Democratic Party's voter data by a factor of 10, accruing 223 million new pieces of info in the last two months of the campaign alonebut the issue was integrating and accessing it. That meant, for example, that a volunteer using the campaign's much ballyhooed phone-bank app, which automatically provided volunteers with the names and numbers of voters, might waste precious time talking to a low-priority target. If in 2008 the Obama operation grew expert at unlocking new tools to mine data and target different constituencies, the challengeand, by most indications, the major advancementof 2012 has been to tear down the barriers preventing the campaign from taking full advantage of the information it amasses. That's where Reed and his geek squad come in. Campaigns typically draw on data from five sources. There's your basic voter file, publicly available information provided by each state, which includes your name, address, and voting record. The party's file, compiled by partisan organizations like VoteBuilder, includes more detailed information. Did you vote in a caucus? Did you show up at a straw poll? Did you volunteer for a candidate? Did you bring snacks to a grassroots meet-up? Did you talk to a canvasser about cap-and-trade? Contribution data, which the campaign compiles itself, includes both public information that campaigns disclose to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and nonpublic data like the names of small-dollar donors. By the 2000 election, political data firms like Aristotle had begun purchasing consumer data in bulk from companies like Acxiom. Now campaigns didn't just know you were a pro-choice teacher who once gave $40 to save the endangered Rocky Mountain swamp gnat; they also could have a data firm sort you by what type of magazines you subscribed to and where you bought your T-shirts. The fifth source, the increasingly powerful email lists, track which blasts you respond to, the links you click on, and whether you unsubscribe. In the past, this information has been compartmentalized within various segments of the campaign. It existed in separate databases, powered by different kinds of software that could not communicate with each other. The goal of Project Narwhal was to link all of this data together. Once Reed and his team had integrated the databases, analysts could identify trends and craft sharper messages calibrated to appeal to individual voters. For example, if the campaign knows that a particular voter in northeastern Ohio is a prolife Catholic union member, it will leave him off email blasts relating to reproductive rights and personalize its pitch by highlighting Obama's role in the auto bailoutor Romney's outsourcing past. A ProPublica analysis revealed that a single OFA fundraising email came in no less than 11 different varieties. Similarly, a canvasser in the field will use her smartphone or tablet to access certain personal info about the voters she's trying to contact, and will also be able to call up tips on what issues to raise and what kind of pitch to make, which is derived from the campaign's voter analytics. She is then able to enter more

informationwhat worked and what didn't, which issues resonateddirectly into the system. The effect is to transform the historically tactile practice of canvassing into something more empirical. But perhaps nothing has changed the game for political microtargeters more than the ubiquity of social networks. Privacy rules, which vary from site to site, technically render a lot of data inaccessible; Facebook's terms of use limit the extent to which outside groups can mine the site. But the Obama campaign has found ways around those barriers too. One of the campaign's most useful innovations in 2008 was to create a social-media platform, My.BarackObama.com, that encouraged its 2 million members to log in with their Facebook accounts. Those who did consented to the campaign's harvesting some of their Facebook data. Four years later, the campaign has grown even more sophisticated. Visit Dashboard, the 2012 organizing portal that Reed helped develop, and you're given a never-ending variety of tasks designed to both engage you and learn more about you. If you sign your name to a petition on the site, that's tracked. If, as you're prompted to do time and again, you write a paragraph explaining what the campaign means to you, that text can be mined for relevant signifiers (say, support for LGBT equality) and added to your voter profile. "I teach this, and to a T my students use the word 'creepy,'" says Daniel Kreiss, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill whose new book, Taking Our Country Back, focuses on the rise of the Democrats' digital machine. "In terms of just the sheer amount of data that political candidates have on you, I think everyone finds it creepy." In practice, the Obama team isn't doing anything private companies haven't already been doing for a few years. But the scope of its operation represents a major shift for politicsvoters expect to be able to obsessively analyze information about the candidates, not the other way around. For OFA, though, there's no such thing as TMI.

REED REPRESENTS an approach to technology that distinguishes the Obama campaign from its counterpart in Boston. Whereas Romney has outsourced much of his data-focused operations, this time around Team Obamawhich has been advised by representatives from Google and Facebook, according to Bloomberg Businessweekis trying to emulate a start-up atmosphere in hopes of fostering the kind of innovation rarely associated with stuffy political shops. Fewer consultants, more in-house geeks. "[They've] taken this sort of data-driven mentality and expanded it across the entire campaign," says Josh Hendler, the former director of technology at the Democratic National Committee, who's staying on the sidelines in 2012. Dashboard, for instance, mimics some of the gaming tactics that Threadless pioneered. Volunteers can see their personal statistics updated in real timemoney raised, calls attempted, conversations held, one-on-one meetings convened. A scoreboard allows volunteers to see how they stack up against their peers. The campaign, in turn, can use this data to gauge which field offices are hitting their goals and which ones aren't. As the campaign becomes ever more absorbed in all things digital, its real-world networks have shifted accordingly. One of Reed's first moves as CTO was to fly with Slaby to San Francisco, where they held an information session for techies at Zeitgeist, a popular Mission District beer garden. In February, OFA unveiled a new satellite technology office in the city's ultra-wired SoMa neighborhood, the first of a handful of such offices slated to open across the country.

Romney's Boston campaign operation, by contrast, had no software engineers on staff until well after the end of the primary season, according to a Mother Jones analysis of payroll data provided to the FEC. Its forays into the digital world have caught attention mostly for their miscues, like an iPhone app that featured a misspelled "America." But the campaign has quietly begun tackling the same challenges faced by OFA, only with a twist. Slate's Sasha Issenberg reported in July that the campaign had recently hired eggheads from places like Google Analytics and Apple in an attempt to reverse engineer the Obama campaign's strategy. Hence Team Obama's shroud of secrecy around its digital ops. It's ironic that Romney's 2012 campaign is reduced to such a reactive mode since the former consultant was himself an early convert to the data-centric campaign. When Alex Lundry's conservative analytics shop, TargetPoint, approached the Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate in 2002 with the idea of using analytics to identify voters, Romney's Bain confidants were stunned: "You mean they don't do this in politics?" Lundry signed on this summer to lead Team Romney's data efforts but, overall, the campaign has favored contracting the work of microtargeting to private firms. The good news for Romney is that it's never been easier to buy off the rack. As of late June, the Romney campaign had paid $13 million to Targeted Victory, whose cofounder, Zac Moffatt, is also the campaign's digital director. Moffatt brags that his firm can beam totally different messages to two voters in the same house. That's 2005 stuff for commercial advertisers, but in the political world it still counts as innovation. At Moffatt's direction, Romney is placing an emphasis on "off the grid" votersthe roughly 30 percent of voters who Moffatt has determined don't watch enough live television to be swayed by commercials. It's a number that will only increase as more and more people consume media on handheld devices or DVR their favorite shows. In 2010, Targeted Victory began employing Lotame, a company that uses cookies to track your online habitseverything from the websites you comment on to the articles you share with friends. To gauge voter sentiment it even crawled Huffington Post comment sections, according to the Wall Street Journal. (Huffington Post says it ended its relationship with Lotame after the incident due to privacy concerns.) Asked about the company's political operations, a spokesman says, "Lotame has been asked to stop talking about it."* The line between data mining and cyberstalking is already blurred, especially in the commercial sector. To illustrate their powers, analysts like to point to Target, which used a 25-element "pregnancy prediction score" that guessed online shopper's due dates. Political campaigns are just catching up, but once they do, their privacy practices may be tougher to control because of the protections afforded to political speech. "Basically we have a new world of information management that has emerged, and it's a world that may well claim total impunity from regulation," says Joe Turow, a University of Pennsylvania professor studying voter attitudes toward political data mining. Crunching data can only take a campaign so far. Microtargeting can help candidates squeeze more dollars out of their supporters, and more value out of those dollars; it can't change the prevailing political environment. Yet in a tight raceand today, presidential elections come down to a handful of percentage pointsobsessive intelligence-gathering can provide a critical edge. "If it's close, you're absolutely talking about winning and losing the election based on the quality of your data, and the quality of the program," Hendler says.

IN LATE JUNE, as I finished hoovering up the online traces of the man tasked with assembling the president's data-mining operation, Reed was polishing off book number 558, A.I. Apocalypse. It's about a high school computer geek who accidentally unleashes an out-of-control AI program that threatens to overwhelm the world. Among technologists, singularitythe idea that technological forces will one day usher in a new form of superintelligence that will forever change civilizationis something of a Holy Grail. It's a vision of the future with plenty of appeal for someone who, like Reed, owes his career to the power of collective intelligence. His bio on his personal website notes, right after name-checking Threadless, "I am patiently waiting for the singularity." The rise of the genius machines probably won't come in 2012. Until then, Harper Reed will have to do. MotherJones: Meet Obama's Digital Gurus http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/obama-campaign-tech-staff By Tim Murphy September/October 2012 Last fall, a tech-savvy startup burst onto the scene with a hiring spree: "We are looking for analytics engineers and scientists in our Chicago headquarters to work on text analytics, social network/media analysis, web personalization, computational advertising, and online experiments & testing." Since then, Obama for America (OFA) quietly has added dozens of positions that never would have existed 10 years agotitles like chief scientist, director of modeling, battleground states election analyst, and chief integration and innovation officer. Here's what they do: Joe Rospars, Chief digital strategist Howard Dean's lasting political legacy isn't the "I have a scream" speech; it's Blue State Digital, the tech consulting firm founded by Rospars and other ex-Deaniacs soon after the 2004 election that was the first serious effort by Democrats to harness the web for political ends. Rospars and Co. revolutionized the way campaigns used the web during Obama's 2008 race by borrowing tactics from social networks and Google. The end result: 2 million Facebook friends, 13 million email addresses, 14.5 million hours of YouTube views, $500 million raised onlineand 365 electoral votes. He rejoined the Obama campaign in 2011. Michael Slaby, Chief integration and innovation officer Kazuyoshi Ehara / Mesh Marketing / NewscomSlaby, another 2008 vet, helped Rospars run the campaign's new-media shop during that primary season before being promoted to chief technology officer, a job in which he faced the data integration challenges he's brought Reed on to fix in 2012. As CIIO, he oversees the campaign's technology, operations (think IT), and analytics departments. His big idea this time around perhaps building on his stint at the PR powerhouse Edelmanis "micro-listening," i.e., studying the habits and traits of individual voters to understand how to target them. Rayid Ghani, Chief scientist A political novice, Ghani came to the campaign from Chicago-based R&D firm Accenture Technology Labs, where he specialized in building algorithms from various data setslike consumer shopping habitsto help businesses improve their bottom lines. In one of his more recent projects, Ghani developed a model to estimate, with 96 percent accuracy, the end price of an eBay auctioninformation that could then be used

to sell price insurance to queasy users worried about coming up short. At OFA, his skills have been put to use on Project Dreamcatcher, which uses text analytics to gauge voter sentiment. Teddy Goff, Digital director Christopher Dilts / Obama for AmericaGoff, another Blue State Digital alum, handled new media for battleground states in 2008; now he's in charge of social networking, overseeing powerful messaging platforms like Twitter (18 million followers) and the campaign's Tumblr alter ego. Goff joined in the collaborative effort to create Dashboard, the campaign's one-stop online organizing portal, which helps Chicago track the progress of field offices and meet-up groups anywhere in the country. Michelangelo D'Agostino, Senior analyst US Department of Energy D'Agostino worked as an astrophysicist at Argonne National Laboratory and in Antarctica, where he did fieldwork on particle physics and freelanced for The Economist. Now, working under digital analytics director Amelia Showalter*, he helps the campaign sift through enormous amounts of data to figure out whom to target. Like many of the campaign's analytics hires, he's never worked on a political campaign before. Chris Hughes, Alumnus Brooks Kraft / CorbisThe 2012 digital campaign was built on a foundation Hughes helped create. A cofounder of Facebook, Hughes left the company in 2007 to pitch in at the Obama camp's new-media campaign in Chicago, where he built a social-media platform, My.BarackObama.com, that mimicked (and mined) Facebook's core features. He's now owner and editor in chief of The New Republic. Dan Siroker, Alumnus OptimizelySiroker took a leave of absence from Google to join the Obama campaign's analytics team in 2007, spearheading its data crunching. Borrowing from his company's bread and butter, he used A/B and multivariate testing to increase volunteer sign-ups and donations (racking up an extra $100 million for Team Obama). After serving briefly as an adviser to the White House, he started Optimizely, a web optimization outfit that provides services to both the Obama and Romney campaigns. Pete Backof, Analyst If you get the impression that the Obama campaign is playing mind games with its incessant fundraising emails, it's because they are. Backof came to the campaign from the Analyst Institute, a secretive, unionfounded, Washington research shop that specializes in applying behavioral science to lefty political causes. On his Twitter profile, Backof describes his expertise as "Building better political mousetraps through randomized controlled experiments." Update: As many readers pointed out, there was one glaring oversight in what was meant to be a snapshot of the Obama digital world: women. It wasn't for lack of merit. Some of the top positions on the tech and digital side are held by womenfrom analytics, to organizing, to special projects, to digital outreach. Here's a quick, but by no means comprehensive, glance:

Amelia Showalter, director of digital analytics: Showalter, who cut her teeth targeting voters through television, brings a simple philosophy to her work for the campaign: "Quantitative political consulting is producing the right metrics and models to make well-informed decisions." What that means, in layman's terms: Showalter specializes in digging through demographic data and voter files to figure out where and how to hunt for voters. Betsy Hoover, digital organizing director: The Obama campaign's social media prowess in 2008 was well documented, but there was plenty of room for improvement. Hoover's role is that of a community builder, helping channel enthusiasm online into fundraising dollars and volunteer shifts. Here she is introducing the campaign's new grassroots fundraising page as part of OFA's one-stop organizing portal, Dashboard: Marie Ewald, deputy digital director: A veteran of the 2008 race (where Ewald directed the Obama campaign's email effort), she brought A/B testingsending variations of a headline or photo to a randomized set of users to determine what's most effectiveto the Clinton Foundation, where she estimated it brought in an additional $1,022,571 in aid for Haiti. This time around, Ewald's working in an expanded role, reporting to digital director Teddy Goff. Laura Olin, Tumblr czar: Formerly of Rospars' Blue State Digital, Olin is the voiceoften ebullient, occasionally snarkyof the official Barack Obama Tumblr, part of the campaign's .gif-friendly outreach strategy to (mostly) young voters. (A sample post, highlighted by the campaign in private social media briefings, featured a Parks and Recreation reference, a Michelle Obama .gif, and 8,264 notes.) But it's always on message: The campaign recently used its Tumblr as part of an online voter registration push. Catherine Bracy, community outreach lead: Bracy reached out to heavyweights in the Bay Area's digital world, from Craiglist to Google, before helping to launch the Obama campaign's San Francisco technology field office last March. Based in the city's tech-heavy SoMa district (it shares a suite with a social media startup), the office was unique in its scope, aimed not at making phone calls and knocking on doors, but on encouraging local digital pros to chip in for the campaign in their free time. *This story originally stated that D'Agostino reported to Chief Analytics Officer Dan Wagner. Slate: Advertising on Facebook: Its Finally Good for Winning Votes http://mobile.slate.com/blogs/victory_lab/2012/10/02/advertising_on_facebook_it_s_finally_good_for_win ning_votes_.html Sasha Issenberg October 2, 2012 This, from today's Wall Street Journal, is the thing that could finally make Facebook a useful platform for winning votes: To amp up the effectiveness of its ads, Facebook in recent months has begun allowing marketers to target ads at users based on the email address and phone number they list on their profiles, or based on their surfing habits on other sites.In September, Facebook began allowing marketers with their own lists of email addresses and phone numbers to target ads at specific groups of Facebook users of at least 20 at a time. Facebook matches up that outside data with information users have entered into their profile. Facebooks tough grip on member data made it impossible to match up users Facebook profiles to their voter-file identities, unless supporters identified their friends manually. Ads had to be targeted through users likes, which naturally made it a poor platform for the two dominant modes of electoral

communication: persuasion and mobilization. Is anyone who clicks to like Barack Obama going to possibly be persuadable? And is someone who goes to the trouble to like Mitt Romney going to be the type of voter who requires an extra nudge to the polls?

Since no campaign wants to individually engage voters in those terms without knowing who they are and how they are likely to vote, campaigns stuck to ancillary activity on Facebook. They produced content they hoped would be shareable, or engineered stunts that could go viral. They experimented with ad buys, but typically with the goal of converting supporters into volunteers or donors, where poor targeting carries little risk. A fun example of this is suggested by Joe Trippi in a Politico story about small-dollar online fundraising: sending ads to promote a meet-George-Clooney fundraising contest to those who liked Oceans 11. If one of the ads is served to a Cheadle-loving Republican, whats the downside? But the ability to link Facebook users to individual data points on their voter-file records ought to dramatically expand the type of electioneering that can be intelligently conducted on social-media platforms. A recent get-out-the-vote experiment by UCSD's James Fowler involving 61 million Facebook users demonstrated the networks unique potential to combine online social pressure with offline voter identification. All Facebook: Paul Ryan Finds Winning Facebook Formula as Campaign Strategists Name Favorite Features http://allfacebook.com/paul-ryan-campaign-strategists-favorite-facebook-features_b100939 Jennifer Moire October 1, 2012 With Election Day only 40 days away in a cycle thats been dubbed the first social election, campaigns are working overtime to gain an advantage on Facebook in order to motivate supporters and get out the vote. A look at the Facebook pages for each presidential campaign says a lot about how the race on Facebook is managed behind-the-scenes. For example, while President Barack Obama leads Republican challenger Mitt Romney in Facebook fan page likes, it might surprise you to learn that Romney actually leads Obama in the people talking about this metric. Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan is outpacing Vice President Joe Biden by leaps and bounds in both fan page likes and people talking about this, putting the Wisconsin native more in the league of his running mate and the president than the vice president. Ryans strength on Facebook makes me wonder why the Obama team which pioneered the use of social media in presidential politics isnt doing more to make Biden competitive on Facebook. There appears to be a clear strategy to funneling all of the campaigns digital resources into Obamas Facebook presence. Ryans Facebook team appears to be more aggressive. One strategist on Capitol Hill with knowledge of the Ryan approach says the team has done a good job with Facebook growth and shows a willingness to try different methods. While Zac Moffatt, top digital strategist for the Romney campaign, has talked openly about his teams focus on engagement, Facebook ads have also played a role in the Republican presidential campaigns fan growth. It wouldnt be a surprise to this strategist if the Romney campaigns Facebook ad buy totaled $250,000 per week.

Theres certainly nothing wrong with using Facebook ads to spur growth. Obama had made a significant investment in using Facebook ads in myriad ways, including as a cornerstone of the campaigns voterregistration drive an issue that Democrats in particular have invested heavily in promoting across the country. We asked digital strategists about some of their favorite Facebook features this election year. Custom Audiences Ryan Cassin, a partner with Connect Strategic Communications, a firm that works primarily with Republican candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, named this new Facebook feature as his favorite tool: Something were excited about is the brand-new custom audiences ad targeting. Our campaigns have all spent a year or more building massive email lists, and now being able to target these supporters directly on Facebook is great timing for us. Were looking forward to watching the click-through rate for ads targeted to supporters we may not have been reaching on Facebook before, especially with ads pushing last-minute fundraising. With custom audiences, campaigns can now target very specific voting groups and quantify their reach like never before. For example, a campaign could target senior citizens who are interested in fiscal issues and lost a child in Iraq. People Talking About This GOP digital strategist Vincent Harris says his go-to metric is the people talking about this number: This cycle has made timeline incredibly important, and the ability of candidates to properly showcase visually their records. When it comes to advertising, mobile advertising and Facebooks new power editor are new and improved tools that are incredibly helpful for candidates. Mobile CTRs are sky high. In the waning days of the race, expect both campaigns to leverage Facebooks ad targeting features to get specific voting groups to the polls. One strategist said he expects to see both camps use open graph integration, as well as location-based targeting and ads promoting sponsored search results. Readers: Have you clicked on any Facebook ads from politicians this election year? Mashable: Behind the Social Media Campaigns of Obama and Romney http://mashable.com/2012/09/28/social-media-obama-romney/ Samantha Murphy September 28, 2012 With about five weeks left until the 2012 presidential election, both Democrats and Republicans are kicking their campaigns into high gear. As more potential voters turn to the Internet to stay connected and less are catching political TV spots the need to leverage social media to hit respective audiences has never been greater. But the payoff could be huge for either party.

The force behind the campaign for Republican candidate Mitt Romney includes a digital rapid response department that works alongside the communications team at its Boston headquarters. Romneys digital director, Zac Moffatt who oversees all social media initiatives, as well as email and text message marketing, website and online advertising and mobile strategy says the campaign is getting ready to ramp up efforts in the days leading up to the election, and social media will play a big part in that. There is a higher level of expectation for speed than in past elections for getting information out, and the campaigns have to be that much faster, whether its through mobile or social media sites such as Google+, Facebook and Twitter, Moffatt said. The Internet is a powerful thing, and not everyone is watching TV spots anymore, so were trying to use the web to our advantage the best way we can. To manage the flow, the team went from 14 staffers in the primaries to about 120 people. The campaign keeps an eye on social media sentiment and what people are saying, from voters to journalists. About 6 million people are already connecting to Romneys campaign on social media sites. We are always monitoring the online audience, but its hard to measure success right now, he said. There are about six million people connected to the campaign on social media sites right now, and we know people are engaged. We need to keep that engagement thriving. To do so, Moffatt said the team is about to work even harder in the days leading up to the debates and Election Day. His day begins at about 7 a.m. with a series of conference calls and meetings that conclude around 9 a.m. The meetings dont pick up again until about 11 a.m. across different states and departments, and then momentum builds throughout the day as projects in need of approval pour in. On a good day, things wrap around 8 p.m. There have been a lot of really late nights, Moffatt said, adding that hes relied on Diet Coke to make it through the sleepiest of times. Fortunately, I dont have to travel that much its far more time-efficient not to travel and just get work done at the office. Plus, I have a young daughter at home, so I like to be as close as possible to my family. Moffatt said his team has become especially close throughout the entire process, noting that many even went to his wedding: When you spend so much time doing what you do for work, its important to have the right people around you, he said. As time rolls closer to Election Day, millions of people will start to visit the website in the next 30 days, coupled with the 6 million people already engaging on Facebook and Twitter, so the team is about to ramp up efforts now more than ever. When we get into the final stage, we will work with state teams for volunteers who do door-knocking and boast up our online strategy about eight times more, Moffatt said. We are moving into a phase of mobilization where every day is important. But after the election, Moffatt has just one thing on his mind: Sleep, he said. I also want to spend more time with my young daughter and my wife. Meanwhile, President Obamas team is also keeping social media top of mind throughout the campaign. Not only is it leveraging his more than 20 million Twitter followers and nearly 29 million Facebook fans

significantly more than Romneys social media presence by sending out registration information and statements about Obamas views, they are also posting articles, tweeting facts about Romneys stances and using it as a platform to respond quickly when needed. As we push through the few weeks of this election, social media is one important way we can keep a conversation going with our supporters and undecided voters across the country about the clear choice Americans face in this election between the Presidents plan to keep moving forward with an economy built on a strong middle class, and Mitt Romneys plan to go back to the same failed policies of the past, Obama spokesperson Adam Fetcher told Mashable. Those behind Obamas social media strategy are clearly sharp and quick, too: It didnt take long for Obama to react to Clint Eastwoods Invisible Obama routine, which took place at the 2012 Republican National Convention last month and became a meme that spread like wildfire across the Internet. Obama tweeted a picture sent from the @BarackObama account, run by his campaign of him sitting in a chair marked the President. His caption: This seats taken. Many applauded the campaigns use of social media to respond quickly to what was happening. In addition, Obama received national attention for participating in an Ask Me Anything Q&A session on popular site Reddit. It marked a key moment for the blending of politics and Internet culture, with more than 200,000 users viewing the session at one time. Social media is also being blended into other strategies, including mobile. The campaign is using a Dashboard tool for supporters and volunteers, so they can get all of the necessary information to become engaged with the campaign, both online and offline. For example, volunteers making calls through the Dashboard tool can have results uploaded in real time to the exact same system used in the field offices. This eliminates duplication and redundancy, and volunteers can share their progress with others on Facebook and Twitter along the way. Connecticut Senate: McMahon Campaign Facebook Game to Urge Murphy to Release Documents http://ctsenate2012.nhregister.com/2012/09/27/mcmahon-campaign-uses-facebook-game-to-urgemurphy-to-release-documents/ Helen Bennett September 27, 2012 In a prepared statement, the campaign of U.S. Senate candidate Linda McMahon Thursday released what it is calling its newest installment in the Murphys Law series in the form of an interactive Facebook game. It contains a theme similar to the campaigns previous use of what it called Connect the Dots to issues it has raised about about McMahons opponent, Democratic candidate U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy, D-5, and his personal ethics and financial matters. As players click from dot to dot, they uncover alarming facts about Congressman Murphys personal history; each dot building the case that Murphy used his position of power in the U.S. Senate to receive special deals from his hometown bank, the prepared statement said. Murphy has denied any such special deals occurred.

As this site has previously reported: Murphy has said he will not release his application for $43,000 home equity line of credit he was given by Webster Bank in 2008. The bank released material showing the 4.99 percent loan was in the middle range of rates. Murphys income had tripled since the foreclosure threat 16 months earlier and the bank said it awarded loans at that time based on which partner had the best credit, which in this case was his wifes. Further, also as previously reported, the Murphy campaign has criticized McMahon for failing to pay debts associated with the 1976 bankruptcy action she and her husband filed. The Day of New London, which discovered the McMahon bankruptcy documents in the National Archives in Massachusetts, reported the McMahons intended to repay the debts. The McMahons had the ability to pay these debts a long time ago. Its a shame that it took 36 years and mounting political pressure for Linda McMahon to finally pay some, but apparently not all, of her debts, Murphy spokesman Ben Marter said recently. Even after this stunning and desperate late-night reversal by Linda McMahon, questions still remain. Voters deserve to know who she still owes, how she plans to pay them back, how much, and why she only now decided to make right on her debts. The game the McMahon campaign placed on Facebook allows users to join the call for Murphy to release the documents and is part of the McMahon campaigns continued effort to urge Murphy to release documents about 2005 and 2008 loans, the statement said. An email seeking comment on the Facebook issue was sent to the Murphy campaign. How long will Congressman Murphy continue to remain in cover-up mode and refuse to provide the documents regarding his special deals? McMahon campaign manager Corry Bliss said, also in the statement. Chris Murphys dishonesty seems to have no bounds, but he cant hide the truth forever. As long as Congressman Murphy insists on ignoring his constituents, he can rest assured that the McMahon campaign will continue the calls for him to come clean on behalf of Connecticut voters. Hartford Courant: Social Media: Candidates Nationwide for Various Political Posts Are Using Social Media as a Campaign Tool http://articles.courant.com/2012-09-24/news/hc-social-media-0922-20120921_1_social-media-campaigntweets-pinterest Amanda Falcone September 24, 2012 U.S. Senate candidate Linda McMahon's campaign tweets regularly, interacts with supporters on Facebook and even uses new social media site Pinterest to highlight things that she likes, such as the cookies she wants to bake for her grandchildren and, of course, the Republican Party. "We try to keep the message consistent across all platforms," said McMahon's spokesman, Todd Abrajano. But times and means of communication have changed since McMahon's failed bid for a U.S. Senate seat two years ago. Her 2010 campaign spent most of its time and effort on more traditional campaign strategies like television commercials. Facebook wasn't as widely used by voters, most did not tweet and Pinterest didn't exist.

McMahon is not the only political candidate who is now using social media to get a message out, particularly to young voters. The phenomenon began in 2008 when President Barack Obama got people's attention by mobilizing supporters through social media. He continues to use social media platforms to reach people from the White House , and now candidates across the country from those running for president to those vying for a state legislative seat are adding social media to their list of campaign tools. They're being used in addition to television ads and interviews with reporters, said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. This year, the use of social media by political campaigns has exploded, he said, explaining that in 2008, Facebook was much smaller and Twitter was just getting started. Obama is using social media again this year to reach voters in his bid for re-election. Recently the campaign announced a new initiative, For All, and it's designed to engage Americans between the ages of 18 and 29. The initiative asks supporters to post photos on social networks that "highlight why we are greater together regardless of race, background, sexual orientation or zip code." "Our digital effort, just like our ground game effort, tries to reach supporters and voters where they are," said Obama campaign spokesman Michael Czin. "In the case of social media that is making sure we are using all platforms to give our supporters the tools they need to reach their own networks of friends and family ." Obama's opponent, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, also uses social media, but his campaign couldn't be reached for comment. Rosenstiel said it's hard to determine whether using social media helps political campaigns, but using platforms like Twitter and Facebook has become commonplace and he said people will notice if a candidate doesn't use them. "The biggest risk is not doing something," he said.

Abrajano says that each campaign uses social media differently. For example, McMahon's campaign recently launched a photo caption contest on its Facebook page. The first photo of McMahon's opponent, Democrat Chris Murphy, sitting across from former U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, got more than 600 responses, Abrajano said. McMahon's campaign employs one person who is dedicated to social media, but the ideas for some of the more creative uses of social media are generated from a larger group, he said. "It would appear from the numbers that we are doing something right," Abrajano said. McMahon and Murphy are in a statistical tie according to the most recent University of Connecticut/Courant poll. Chris Murphy's campaign also has one staffer focused on social media efforts. Murphy mostly uses Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to complement other aspects of an aggressive campaign that includes reaching out to voters and discussing the issues that matter to them, says campaign spokesman Eli Zupnick. "We are certainly going to use every tool at our disposal, including social media, to make sure voters know the truth about Chris and the facts about Linda McMahon," he said. Last winter, the Pew Research Center conducted a nationwide telephone survey to find out whether voters pay attention to politicians on social media. It learned that a portion of social networking site users say social media is important for some of their political activities and the way they decide how to engage with

campaigns and issues. However, most users also said they do not use the sites for political purposes or debates. Pew says the amount of political material users post on social networking sites is relatively small, and it says users who are the most politically engaged get more from social networking sites. A second survey found that 12 percent of adults who go online use Pinterest, 12 percent use the photosharing service Instagram and 5 percent use the Tumblr, a social blogging service. More adult users stay connected through Facebook, 66 percent; LinkedIn, 20 percent and Twitter, 16 percent. When campaigns interact with people through social media, Rosenstiel said, they are likely talking to a more engaged audience. People have to choose to follow politicians and to participate in discussions, and that is different from when campaigns run television advertisements, he said. But in the end, 40 percent of voters side with Republicans and 40 percent side with Democrats, leaving politicians to target the swing vote during campaign season, Rosenstiel said. While less partisan, those voters are often less informed and may not be the people you will reach on Twitter or Facebook, he said. "Who you are and who you are appealing to dictates your technology strategy to some extent," Rosenstiel said, stressing that even with technology at their disposal, it's still necessary for candidates to reach voters in a more standard, stereotypical way through television ads, lawn signs and meet-and-greets. Arizona Daily Star: Candidates Cast Their Nets on Facebook, Twitter, But Woo Factor is Thought Slight http://azstarnet.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/elections/candidates-cast-their-nets-on-facebooktwitter-but-woo-factor/article_670b2ac2-35d0-5bb8-b95a-9aec2f63feb0.html Brady McCombs September 23, 2012 Good luck opening Facebook or Twitter these days without seeing something from candidates vying for your vote in November's election. With social media playing an ever-larger role in everyday life, campaign teams see these channels as a fast, free and easy way to get their messages out. They regularly post videos, commentary, links to press releases and take jabs at their opponents. Even if you don't "friend" or "like" any candidate on Facebook or "follow" them on Twitter, one of your friends probably does. But even as social media drives the election chatter, it remains largely ineffective at winning the minds of undecided voters, political strategists say. Votes are still won through old-school channels - TV and radio ads, mailers and knocking on doors. "Its role is really best suited for mobilizing people that are already supporting a particular candidate to go out and get that candidate elected," said David Steele, a political strategist in Tucson. A recent study by the Pew Research Center found that 66 percent of adult Americans use social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+ - but only a quarter consider these sites important for discussing political issues or recruiting people to get involved in a cause.

Even though they encounter plenty of political activity while browsing friends' profiles and news feeds, only 16 percent said they have changed their views about a political issue after discussing it or reading a post on social networking sites. "Keeping in touch with friends and family is by far the main reason why most people use social networking sites," said Aaron Smith, co-author of the study and senior research specialist with the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project. A social media plan is essential to any successful campaign, but it's no magic bullet. "It's not a wise strategy to rely on social media to persuade undecided voters," said Rodd McLeod, a Democratic political strategist. "But it is a good tool to talk to your supporters and hopefully they amplify your message." Tweets, FaceBook posts The familiar icons of the social media giants - Facebook, Twitter and YouTube - can usually be found prominently positioned on a candidate's Web page. Whether running for president or county board of supervisors, any viable candidate now has a Facebook page, a Twitter account and strong presence across all the digital platforms, such as YouTube. "You ignore it at your own peril," said Daniel Scarpinato, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. "It is a key component to getting your message out and communicating with both voters and decision makers." Candidates keep their feeds lively, often with several posts a day. In addition to the standard announcements of endorsements, TV ads and campaign events, they also weigh in on news of the day. "So, President Obama tells a Univision audience that he has learned that 'you can't change Washington from the inside,' " Jeff Flake, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, wrote on his Facebook page this week. "Curious statement, coming from someone seeking a second term. How 'bout we elect someone who hasn't already thrown in the towel?" Candidates often use the sites to promote favorable polls, positive news stories or other accomplishments. "Thanks to your efforts, we've raised more than $51,000 online in just the last week," wrote Richard Carmona, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, on his Facebook page. "The average donation was $70 and that tells me our strategy of leaning on grassroots donors over secret money and Super PACs is working I don't think there's any doubt now that we have the momentum." Facebook is increasingly used to post longer commentary or post pictures. Twitter, which has a 140character limit, is used to post links or for quick jabs. Spokespeople and supporters of candidates often engage in what have become known as "Twitter wars," trading snarky barbs about an issue or something a candidate has done or said.

After a story came out in which Republican U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl admitted that Republicans once tried to recruit Carmona to run for office, Carmona's supporters deluged Flake supporters with Tweets that efforts to paint Carmona as a 'rubber stamp' for Democrats were bogus. Carmona's spokesman Tweeted: "Flake's attacks look pathetic in light of the fact that AZs top Rs wanted @carmonaforaz to run for Congress and Gov." Flake's spokesman shot back: "@CarmonaForAZ never ran for office as a Republican because it turns out he is liberal." Also, many candidates have their own "channels" on YouTube that host collections of TV ads, and Web videos touting their campaigns. Before Facebook and Twitter, a campaign would send out a press release by having interns fax it around. Now, interns post the full version on the campaign website, with a link to it on Twitter and shortened version on Facebook, McLeod said. TV ads, mailers still big For raising money, connecting with media, and enlisting and mobilizing volunteers, social media is effective. But winning the votes that often decide close races means getting your candidate's message in front of people who aren't actively seeking political news and information, strategists say. People have to choose to follow candidates on Twitter or Facebook, meaning most followers are already supporters. "If somebody is undecided, it's not like they get up in the morning and say, "I better go like all the candidates (on Facebook)," said McLeod, the Democratic strategist. "The hard part of reaching undecided voters is getting their attention in the first place." That's why candidates still spend huge chunks of their campaign coffers to buy TV ads. A 30-second spot that comes on between a popular show watched by a wide cross section of people, such as "American Idol," is a better investment than driving home your message with in-the-bag supporters. In the tightly contested Congressional District 1 race between Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick and Republican Jonathan Paton, national party committees have already spent nearly $1 million on TV ads. Mailers also remain popular ways to try to reach undecided voters. Most people go to the mailbox and browse through their mail. That gives a political mailer at least a fighting chance to get read by somebody not actively seeking out political material, political strategist Steele said. For him, the secret weapon isn't high tech, but no tech. "With all the clutter in the messaging marketplace," Steele said, "direct mail is still the most effective tool." Forbes: Is Romney More Social Media Savvy than Obama? http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2012/09/19/is-romney-more-social-media-savvy-than-obama/

Kelly Clay September 19, 2012 If you search for Barack Obama on Google, you get the kind of search results you expect links to Obamas official website, his Wikipedia page, a link to The White House website, and more. If you search for Mitt Romney on Google, you also get the kind of search results you would expect news about his latest PR gaffes, his official website, and so on. But a funny thing happens, though, if you search for Obama on Facebook. You dont get search results for the sitting President. Instead, a sponsored search result for Romney shows up. A similar thing happens if you search for Vice President Biden you get Romneys running mate, Paul Ryan. A search for Bill Clinton who gave a monumental supporting speech for Obama at the DNC a few weeks ago returns a sponsored search result Mitt Romney. It appears Romneys camp is utilizing a new feature in Facebook that allows a Page on Facebook to pay money to show up as a Sponsored result in Facebook search if users search for specific terms (such as Obama). Theres not many rules to this form of advertising, and many brands take it for face value, hoping their own search terms earn them a place in that Sponsored slot when Facebook users search for their business or related topics. But is Romneys sneaky campaign on Facebook indicating that his team might be a little more social media savvy than Obamas? Instead of leveraging Romneys own terms to promote his own campaign, he paid for his name (and Ryans) to appear as a sponsored result when Facebook users searched for his competition, whether it was Obama, Biden, or Clinton. Social media savvy brands already do this in other arenas, such as with Google Adwords, but this move by Romney shows he or someone on his team knows a little something about new media, and is ready to harness the full potential of social media and advertising to reach as many Americans as possible before the election. Obama does know a thing or two about social media, boasting 28 million fans on Facebook, a strong web presence and even a popular Instagram account but Romneys social ad campaign is something we havent seen much from the current President. Of course, while none of this will likely even matter in November, its a good lesson for business owners that have competition to always be one step ahead of them no matter how big or small your potential audience is. Wired: Social Media Really Does Rock the Vote http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/09/social-voting/ Sciencenow September 13, 2012 Brace yourself for a tidal wave of Facebook campaigning before Novembers U.S. presidential election. A study of 61 million Facebook users finds that using online social networks to urge people to vote has a much stronger effect on their voting behavior than spamming them with information via television ads or phone calls. The study comes hot on the heels of a Science paper originally published online on 21 June that tracked how people influence each others online behavior through Facebook. A lingering question remained: Does that online social influence translate to real-world behavior when people step away from the computer? The challenge is to find online and real-world behaviors where cause and effect can be teased out with controlled experiments on a large enough scale.

In the spring of 2010, a golden opportunity fell into the lap of James Fowler, a social scientist at the University of California, San Diego. He had recently been introduced to Cameron Marlow, the director of a new data science team at Facebooks headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Fowler wondered if he could create an experiment using Facebooks giant social network. It just so happened that the U.S. congressional elections were coming up in November of that year, and Facebook was planning on rolling out a nonpartisan Get Out the Vote campaign, reminding people to vote by publishing a message on Facebook users news feeds. With just a few tweaks to how those messages were published, the campaign could be converted into a massive controlled social science experiment: With less than 40 percent of eligible U.S. citizens normally voting in congressional races, would the Facebook campaign have an impact? Since no personal data of Facebook users would be released, Marlow agreed. Fowlers Ph.D. student Robert Bond led the research team. On Election Day, about 60 million people received a message that encouraged them to vote. It included links to local polling stations, a clickable I Voted button, and photos of six of their randomly chosen friends who had already clicked the I Voted button. Two control groups, each containing about 600,000 people, either received a version of the message with voting information but no photos of their friends, or no message at all. Then, to track who actually voted in the election, the team matched peoples names and birth dates with those in the official state election rolls. If the influence of Facebook friends extends beyond the Internet, then seeing the profile photos should translate to voting out in the real world. The photos apparently worked: People who received messages alerting them that their friends had voted were 0.39 percent more likely to vote than those who received messages with no social information. That translates to an additional 282,000 votes cast, the team reports online today in Nature. The effect was four times stronger than just seeing the voting message without photos of friends, and most of that boost came from the peoples closest friends (judging closeness by the frequency of interaction on Facebook). The study is both significant and convincing, says Dylan Walker, a social scientist at Boston University School of Management. The next step, he says, is to see what kinds of relationships matter most. For example, I have different types of friendships with my online peers that go beyond the distinction of casual versus close. Some are work colleagues that I see on an everyday basis; others are old college friends; yet others are high school peers with whom I seldom engage offline but whose updates I read on a regular basis. Do they influence me in different ways? Absolutely. SF Gate: Romney campaign: biggest user of Facebooks mobile ad platform http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2012/09/12/romney-campaign-biggest-user-of-facebooks-mobile-adplatform/ Benny Evangelista September 12, 2012 If Gov. Mitt Romney wins the presidential election in November, he might have the Bay Area to thank. The Republican presidential nominee might not necessarily win over the areas voters. But his campaign has reached out to tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Eventbrite, Rally and Square for help with its digital campaign strategy. These companies allow us to be so much more successful because they bring their expertise to bear and allow us to be able to better glue together the best minds, Romney digital campaign manager Zac Moffatt said during an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt.

Traditional television advertising may not be as effective in political campaigns as before. Moffatt said his team found that one-third of potential registered voters did not watch TV last weekend other than for sports. That means a big segment of their target audience needs to be reached in new ways, including through Facebook, Twitter and Google+, Moffatt said. And the lessons presidential campaigns learn also should provide guidelines for future ad campaigns by businesses. This will be the first (political) campaign in history where digital advertising moves from list building and fundraising application to persuasion and mobilization, he said. Online advertising is redefining the way people are going to get their message out. In the last 60 days, the Romney campaign has become the biggest user of Facebooks experimental mobile advertising platforms and report click-through rates of about 10 percent, an engagement rate far higher than normal Web based ads, Moffatt said. The campaign has also used mobile payments service Square so volunteers can collect donations on the spot at pop-up merchandize stores at events. During the week of the Republican National Convention, those volunteers collected about $1 million nationwide, Moffatt said. Other technologies like Eventbrites event planning tools and Rallys fundraising platform are helping the campaign generate better engagement with voters, he said. However, he said, the only way were going to define success is if we can win in November. Tech Crunch: Mitt Romneys digital director Zac Moffatt: you cant run a political campaign without digital http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/12/romney-digital-director-zac-moffatt/ Frederic Lardinois September 12, 2012 At TechCrunch Disrupt today, our own Greg Ferenstein interviewed Mitt Romneys Digital Director Zac Moffatt. The discussion touched upon a wide variety of issues, ranging from the importance of online ads in political campaigns to the allegations that the Romney campaign bought Twitter followers. As Ferenstein noted at the start of the panel, politics is becoming very important for technology, not just because of the money it brings in through advertising and other means, but also because numerous startups now come out of presidential campaigns. According to Moffatt, its now impossible to run a campaign without digital. Nothing else has the scale and flexibility like digital, he noted. In his view, this will also be the first campaign in history where the campaign moves from just fundraising to mobilization. Political Campaigns And Online Advertising One reason why digital is also becoming so important is because so many people now time-shift their TV viewing, making it a lot harder to reach likely voters. People are living their lives online and you cant pretend this doesnt exist, he said. Whats important to note here, said Moffatt, is that online advertising serves as prospecting to get people from Facebook to eventually creating an account on MittRomney.com. The people who do this, after all, are also the ones who are most likely to volunteer. Interestingly, the Romney campaign is now seeing click-through rates on Facebook that are close to 10% on mobile. Asked about this pretty astonishingly high number, Moffatt pointed out that one thing in the

campaigns favor is that not everybody is running for president. The Romney campaign is also using Apples iAds, though here the focus is more on video and getting people to share content. The campaign is also working with a number of Silicon Valley companies to optimize its processes. Romney 12 is, for example, using tools from Facebook, Google, Square and Eventbrite, among many others. These, said Moffatt, help the campaign to glue together the best services and do things like setting up pop-up merchandise stores during its convention that took in more than $1 million and used Square for mobile payments. If Vanity Metrics Mattered, Justin Bieber Would Be President One issue the Romney campaign is facing is that the Obama campaign has far more followers and friends on Twitter and Facebook. For Moffatt, though, this doesnt seem to be a major issue. He argues that engagement is far more important and even though the Romney campaign has fewer followers on the usual social media sites, its seeing similar engagement rates. If vanity metrics mattered, he argues, Justin Bieber would be president. Its less important that people talk about you (and its hard to know if these conversations are positive or negative anyway), but more important to get people to take actions. As for the allegations that the Romney campaign bought Twitter followers, Moffatt only had one comment: We had nothing to do with that. Tech Crunch: Important study: Facebook quadruples the power of campaign messages http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/12/important-study-facebook-quadruples-the-power-of-campaignmessages/ Gregory Ferenstein September 12, 2012 The first large-scale experimental research on the political influence of social networks finds that Facebook quadruples the power of get-out-the-vote messages. While the single-message study produced a moderately successful boost in turnout (a 2.2% increase in verified votes), the most important finding was that 80% of the studys impact came from social contagion, users sharing messages with friends who would otherwise never have seen it. This is the first definitive proof that social networks, as opposed to television or radio, have uniquely powerful political benefits. While Facebook is unlikely return the United States to the 80 percent-plus voting rates of the 19th Century, this study is an attractive selling point to campaigns and causes looking for a way to maximize their impact for little cost or effort. Published in the latest edition of the prestigious science journal, Nature, the 61 million participant study randomly assigned all Facebook users over 18-years-old to see an I Voted counter at the top of their newsfeed with the number of total users who had voted on Nov 2nd, which had a link for more information about local polling places. Turnout was verified from a database of public voting records. Interestingly, the 3pronged experiment displayed two types of I Voted messages, one with pictures of friends underneath and one without. Those who did not see pictures of their friends were barely affected by the message at all, which raises doubts about the effectiveness of information-only appeals to vote in this context, surmise the authors. The study should be put in a bit of context, because it would be wrong to both assume that Facebook could have dramatic effects on turnout or assume that its limited to 2.2%. The best get-out-the-vote practice, face-to-face canvassing, produces about an 8% bump in turnout. This is a far cry from when the United States had arguably the most active democracy in history. In the 19th century, locally-controlled government, rampant vote-buying, political festivals, and the robust culture of civic

participation of post-Civil War America did more to boost voter turnout than all of the billions of dollars in modern campaigning could ever do (for more information, I recommend two excellent books, Why America Stopped Voting and Amusing Ourselves To Death). In other words, Facebook is potentially (very) powerful, but theres a certain percentage of Americans who just dont respond to modern campaigns, so the power of social networks probably has a ceiling of about 10% at best for presidential campaigns. On the other hand, as Facebook bleeds into older demographics, campaign messages could have a much larger impact than the study found. Young people, who dominate social media, have a notoriously inconsequential effect on elections. Had no one under the age of 30 voted in 2008, Obama still would have won every state but two. Additionally, as researcher Professor James Fowler reminds me in an email, many of those targeted by the study were not registered to vote, could not be matched to voting records, or had already voted. We were intentionally conservative in our estimates published in Nature since we were testing scientific hypotheses. However, if we were to adjust for all these factors, I think for comparison to other GOTV [GetOut-The-Vote] campaigns our effect size would be more in the neighborhood of 5% to 8% and we would find that the message actually got closer to a million extra people to the polls, he writes The likely upshot from the study is that Facebook may be able influence all the likely voters that would ordinarily cost a lot of money to reach. For instance, the entire 2008 presidential parade only boosted youth turnout by 2.1%, roughly the same amount that this single message-study did (of course, the study reached older demographics, as well). A lot more research is needed to understand how Facebook could impact voting rates and engagement with causes. But, at the very least, Facebook could make it a lot easier and cheaper for campaigns and causes to reach all of the latent, civically active citizens waiting to make their impact on the world. Campaigns & Elections: A Social Media-Fueled Upset http://www.campaignsandelections.com/case-studies/327457/a-social-mediafueled-upset.thtml Vincent Harris 9/11/2012 Six months after Republican Ted Cruz announced his candidacy for U.S. Senate, noted Texas political pundit Paul Burka posed this question in print about a race the overwhelming majority of pundits thought was a foregone conclusion: Is it even worth writing about? he asked. The only way [Lt. Gov. David] Dewhurst loses is if someone with more money and better conservative credentials than he has gets into the race. And that would be ... who? Despite being outspent 3 to 1, Ted Cruz went on to win a Republican primary against one of the most powerful Republicans in the state, 56 percent to 44 percent. Dewhurst was not only the heavy favorite from the start, but he was backed strongly by the Texas GOP establishment. This case study looks to examine only one aspect of the campaigns strategyits digital operations. With Ted at the helm, the Cruz campaign ran an aggressive, grassroots-centric race unlike anything previously seen in Texas. From the outset, we knew a strong digital presence was critical to Cruzs chances because initially the campaign simply did not have the funds to compete with Dewhurst on TV. Social media allowed the campaign to motivate and coordinate grassroots supporters, which was critical for an insurgent campaign in a state as big as Texas. Most importantly, digital was baked into all aspects of the campaign from communications to political fieldwork to polling.

Ted announced his candidacy for Senate on a conference call with conservative bloggers. Texas has a large network of active conservative bloggers and giving access to them was important to promoting Teds conservative message and helping generate buzz about his candidacy among the party base. Ted met with bloggers in person and via phone often, and the campaign created a robust blogger action center encouraging bloggers to post supportive widgets, and created a segmented email list to update bloggers from. Social media and the digital space were used as a tool to raise Cruzs name ID, generate online donations and respond to attacks from the Dewhurst campaign. Additionally, Ted utilized web videos early on to break through the clutter and gain some earned media. Paving the way for the campaigns online success was a consulting team that completely bought in when it came to digital. General Consultant Jason Johnson and Campaign Manager John Drogin both believed that digital was an inexpensive way to help level the playing field with the wealthy Dewhurst. Josh Perry, a young conservative who had experience in digital, was brought on to manage the campaigns day-to-day web operations. Josh understood the quick pace at which news spreads online and worked tirelessly with Drogin to respond to voters across the state.

As the campaign progressed Jason and John reached out to me about bringing my firm into the race to supplement what Josh was doing and oversee a broader digital strategy. In the end, even another staffer, Travis McCormick, was added to the campaigns in-house digital arm. By Election Day there were no less than three full time people working on digital, supplemented by my firm and the candidate himself. The buy-in from the campaigns senior strategists allowed us to effectively meld traditional media and new throughout the race. The campaign engaged bloggers to help energize the grassroots, employed a variety of online ad strategies and supplemented our traditional fundraising with successful online efforts. Online Advertising The campaign advertised across a multitude of platforms including Bing/Yahoo, Face book, Google Ad Words and Twitter. Running online ads allowed us to raise money, combat opposition attacks and gain name recognition. Once Ted received a major endorsementtalk show host Sean Hannity or former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, for examplewe targeted advertising on Facebook to people who liked those individuals pages. We also ran ads contextually around the name of the endorser. The goal here was to connect them to Cruz and garner donations. Additionally, we used our endorsements as key words for Google search ads. For example, we raised $4,180 on Sarah Palin keywords, and only spent $43.96 on these ads. Often underutilized on campaigns, we found search advertising incredibly effective. Even Bing and Yahoo, which only represent 35 percent of online searches, produced a positive return. Between July 26 and July 31, we spent $365 on Bing and Yahoo advertising and raised $3,525 of of those ads. This was roughly a 10 to 1 return. It shows how successful the ROI on online advertising can be when ads are part of a rapid response strategy. We also used ads to rebut attacks coming from the Dewhurst campaign and his Super PAC allies. We ran uniquely branded search ads when someone searched Cruz China and other attacks that would lead people to a get the facts page on the main Cruz site. Online advertising wasnt used merely as a rapid

response mechanism but proactively to promote opposition websites like Dewbious.com. Ads were placed contextually through the Google Display Network on articles mentioning Dewhursts name. Organic support for Ted on Facebook and Twitter was supplemented with ads on both sites. On Election Day, we ran a promoted post advertisement to our fans and fans of our endorsements and received 793,432 impressions, 1,136 clicks, 1,880 likes and 1,098 shares. This way, if our content wasnt organically showing up on voters news feeds, we made our way onto their screen with ads reminding them to go vote. Throughout the day new promoted tweets ads went up to people following Ted on Twitter encouraging them to vote and counting down the hours until voting closed. Cruz campaign manager John Drogin had the idea to build a branded microsite that would empower Teds grassroots supporters. The concept came to fruition when we released CruzCrew.org, which invited volunteers to take on tasks and print out campaign literature. Among its features was an interactive map showcasing Teds support county by county across Texas. The site popularly featured a Grassroots Spotlight that showcased dedicated volunteers and supporters. It linked to a Cruz Crew store, where voters could purchase t-shirts and other apparel in support of Ted. Most importantly, the site provided tools for voters to connect and spread the word with their friends easily via Twitter, Facebook and email. Online Fundraising By the end of July, Ted had over 33,000 unique donors, 42,000 donations under $100 and an average donation of $155.58. The campaign utilized online advertising, email fundraising and themed money bombs to successfully raise money online. When it came to proactive fundraising asks by the campaign, email reigned as the best source of online donations. Thecampaign would plan moneybomb initiatives, sometimes weeks in advance, around notable end-of-quarter deadlines or holidays. Often a branded theme would accompany the money bomb: Help launch the Cruz missile or Light the torch of liberty! These microfundraising initiatives would have their own set of branded graphics for ads, the website and emails to ensure that everything was uniform when it came to the visuals. Surprisingly, Facebook and Twitter also raised some money but paled in comparison to money raised via email. Talk radio listeners were another good fundraising source. During interviews, Ted would push listeners to his website, and the campaign would meet them there with a uniquely branded landing page welcoming listeners of whatever radio show he was on. The money rolled in immediately following his on air requests. This melding of traditional media and new media was important to online fundraising success.

What Does It All Mean? Virtually every study done on the consumption of mass media by voters still shows the dominance of television. Theres no doubt that TV ads have an impact on persuading voters and moving the needle in public opinion polls. That said, even in a state as big as Texas, talking one on one to voters and utilizing the web as a means to harness support proved incredibly effective.

Theres no doubt where people are spending their time online: Facebook. The average Facebook user spends more than eight hours a month on the social network, and the Cruz campaign wanted to make sure if a voter was on Facebook, they were interacting with us. On the day of the July 31 runoff, the Cruz campaign outperformed the Dewhurst campaign on social media. In total, the Cruz campaign tweeted 151 times, whereas the Dewhurst campaign tweeted only 11 times. Sixteen of our tweets encouraged voters to head out to the polls, but 135 of those focused on interacting directly with voters. Our effort to interact with voters on Twitter resulted in 2,144 people retweeting us that day, where Dewhurst was only retweeted 64 times. The campaigns social media efforts didnt end there. The Cruz campaign Facebook page was updated 11 times that day, with a total of 2,646 shares and 14,253 likes on our posts. The Dewhurst campaign updated its Facebook page just once, with a measly 49 shares and 392 likes. Additionally, we provided voters with tools to promote our campaign, such as FacebookTimeline covers and profile pictures that touted our #ChooseCruz hashtag. Make no mistake about it: Ted Cruzs natural ability to drum up grassroots support and convey the conservative philosophy is what won him the election. Digital simply served as a way to productively channel the energy into Facebook shares, earned media, donations and eventually votes. Every campaign could benefit from a strong digital presenceone that doesnt simply talk at potential voters but that has a productive conversation with them. PandoDaily: Rally.orgs Donations Shows Us Americas Stingiest States http://pandodaily.com/2012/09/11/rally-orgs-donations-data-shows-us-americas-stingiest-states/ Hamish McKenzie September 11, 2012 Thanks to digital platforms and the increasing importance of social media, were getting better data for this election campaign than ever before. Who attracts the most chatter on Twitter? Thats Obama. Youre a candidate and want to know where your donors live? NationBuilder can help you with that. What were the top ten most talked about moments from the Democratic and Republican conventions on Facebook? Theres a page for that. Now, online donations tool Rally.org can inform candidates in detail how people are reacting to particular campaign content, and who are the most generous givers. This election cycle candidates and campaigns have much more granular awareness of the impact of their messaging, says Rally co-founder and marketing head Jonas Lamis. Rally provides analytics that help reduce the guesswork political campaigns previously had to do on what messages were moving the needle, and why. So who among us are the most willing to dig deep into their pockets for political purposes? After studying the online giving patterns of 1 million individual donations across more than 10,000 politically-oriented causes, Rally found that Democratic-leaning states were the biggest givers, but the two parties were pretty much even when it came to moderate donations (between $100 and $150) state by state. As Rallys infographics show, if you happen to live in a northeastern state or Wyoming, youre more likely to vote with your wallet than folks in other states.

All Facebook: How Facebook propelled U.S. Senate Candidate Ted Cruz to Primary Win http://allfacebook.com/ted-cruz-primary-win_b99360 Jennifer Moire September 11, 2012 Facebook and social media played a pivotal role in the outcomes of several U.S. Senate primaries this summer. A new case study broke down just how the social network propelled one tea party candidate in Texas from a virtual unknown to a political insider. The politicos handbook, Campaigns & Elections, features a profile of Senate candidate Ted Cruzs recipe for primary success by his digital strategist, Vincent Harris. Cruz was a featured speaker at last months Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla. One of the takeaways is the boost that social media can give unknown candidates who lack the resources to launch radio and television advertising. For example, Cruz spent money on Google search ads, as well as advertising on Bing and Yahoo, which yielded a 10-to-1 return on investment. Heres a look at how Cruzs Facebook strategy played out: Facebook ads supplemented Cruzs organic support on Facebook, as well as Twitter. On the day of the election, the digital team ran a get out the vote (GOTV in campaign parlance) promoted post to fans and fans of their endorsements, which generated 793,432 impressions, 1,136 clicks, 1,880 likes, and 1,098 shares. This way, if the content wasnt organically showing up on voters news feeds, it made our way onto their screens with ads reminding them to go vote. The Cruz Facebook page was updated 11 times that day, with a total of 2,646 shares and 14,253 likes on its posts. The David Dewhurst campaign updated its Facebook page just once, yielding 49 shares and 392 likes. Harris said tools to promote the campaign were shared with voters, such as a Facebook timeline cover image and profile pictures that touted its #ChooseCruz hashtag. Harris added: Theres no doubt where people are spending their time online: Facebook. The average Facebook user spends more than eight hours per month on the social network, and the Cruz campaign wanted to make sure that if a voter was on Facebook, they were interacting with us. As far as fundraising, Harris said emails and appeals via talk radio were the most effective, although some donations were generated via Facebook. And in the waning days of the campaign, a microsite, CruzCrew.org, launched to motivate volunteers to tackle mailing and other campaign tasks. In the end, it all comes down to engagement, as weve heard before. Cruz clearly had a message that resonated with voters. Yet Harris noted that, through digital media, the campaign was able to not just talk to voters, but have a productive conversation that resulted in a major victory. Readers: Do you think campaigns this election year will turn on digital media tools such as Facebook? POLITICO: Tech Firm Snafus Snarl Conventions http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/80934.html?hp=t1

Steve Friess September 8, 2012 The political world has seen the future and the future for now is glitchy. This was the year technology was expected to transform an American relic: the national convention. Yet many of the newfangled elements trotted out to open digital doors to folks far from Charlotte or Tampa encountered technical problems, drew tiny audiences or simply proved ineffectual. Many of Googles video hangouts were riddled with sound problems. The news-sharing site Reddit crashed while hosting President Barack Obama's question-and-answer session. YouTube shut off public access to video of the DNCs first night including Michelle Obamas speech for nearly 12 hours. Facebooks efforts to get the thousands of RNC attendees to identify themselves in a high-def photo from the hall drew only 75 participants. This is still an age of trial-and-error for all these new channels, said Fordham University communications professor Paul Levinson, who teaches about technology, politics and culture. They constantly put up new gimmicks or options. We can look at this almost as a tryout for the major leagues. Social media no doubt enjoyed dramatic successes over the past fortnight, with Twitter and Facebook clearly firming up their places as reliable go-to spaces for online sharing and even political organizing. Google certainly maintained its dominance in Internet search, and its subsidiary, YouTube, knows few rivals when it comes to posting and viewing videos. Facebook felt generally positive about its experience, spokesman Andrew Noyes said. "From our teams' personal interactions with attendees in Charlotte and Tampa to the global audience reached through information and insights shared in print, online, and on-air, we believe Facebook helped make these important quadrennial gatherings the most social in history," he said. But snafus and misfires abounded, some more serious than others, to remind us that 2012 is part of a transition era rather than an accurate depiction of the ultimate technological destination. Top of the screw-up heap: Visitors to the Democratic National Conventions own website could not play back any of Tuesdays proceedings for many hours. The DNCs live stream was hosted by YouTube in a special arrangement. Users who wanted to scroll back to see the first ladys much-lauded talk encountered various error messages indicating that the material had been blocked because of copyright issues. After Tuesday's live stream ended, YouTube briefly showed an incorrect error message on the page hosting the completed live stream instead of the standard This event is complete message, according to a statement from a Google spokesperson. Yet as of late morning on Wednesday, users continued to find that attempts to play the video yielded a message with a frown-face reporting the content they sought to view was private. The trouble was never fully explained.

Its a head-scratcher, said law professor Jack Lerner, director of the University of Southern California Intellectual Property and Technology Law Clinic. I cant imagine that the Democratic Party wasnt on the phone screaming at Google. Google+ Hangouts, a recordable online video conference venue heavily promoted at the RNC and DNC, also ran into some challenges. The search company built special booths at both conventions from which politicians, journalists and others could hold live chats with non-attendees scattered across the country. Many outlets, including C-SPAN and The Daily Beast, used Hangouts to create videos for their sites, too. Google declined to make anyone available to discuss the Hangout or YouTube problems. Yet video and audio quality was wildly inconsistent and unreliable in many cases. C-SPAN spokesman Howard Mortman, whose network conducted several Hangouts, praised the service for the convenience and cost savings it offers no studio or satellite arrangements needed but acknowledged there were downsides. We had a discussion with the journalist Rachel Sklar and Julie Moos of Poynter that had those lighting and glitchy audio technical issues and we showed parts of it on the air, Mortman said. Thats Googles technology. It will get better. Among the biggest surprises was that up-and-comer Reddit crashed while hosting Obama on Aug. 29 for a live chat. Years ago, sites regarded it as a badge of honor to be forced offline by overwhelming demand, but youd think people would learn, said Dartmouths Brendan Nyhan, a government professor who focuses on social media in politics. Its not really cute anymore to crash websites. It seems like when youre having the president of the United States, you might anticipate he might draw a large audience. Reddit general manager Erik Martin said they "wish it had gone better but considering the short notice, it's an amazing feat that a social data-heavy site with only 20 employees was able to handle it at all. We are working on improving bottlenecks in our infrastructure that should make the site faster overall and especially [during] massive events like this." Of course, a large audience online is relative. Twitter was quick after Obamas Thursday night speech to announce a new record political moment after logging 52,757 DNC-related tweets per minute during Obamas acceptance speech. And YouTube eagerly proclaimed it counted more than 2.5 million views of convention-related material during the GOP event for a total of 300,000 hours of video watched. Yet YouTube clearly remains a supplement to the still-dominant audience aggregator that is television. The presidents speech on Thursday peaked at 178,000, a big number for the Web but a sliver of the millions who watch even the low-rated TV shows. Former President Bill Clintons stem-winder, for instance, drew a top live YouTube audience of 78,000 on Wednesday. Meanwhile, more than 25.1 million were watching on TV, Nielsen reported. No, its not a lot, said Vincent Harris, a Republican digital campaign strategist working for Senate candidates Ted Cruz and Linda McMahon. It shows there are limits. Seventy-eight thousand people is small town, perhaps 78,000 votes in a swing state could swing an election, but thats in one state.

What these online platforms are good for, Harris and others say, is amplifying and echoing the news. Levinson pointed to two moments the RNC spectacle of Clint Eastwood quizzing an invisible Obama in an empty chair and the DNC moment of Clinton zinging Rep. Paul Ryan for his brass as clues to how these mediums interact. The real big, long thumping tail is what people are tweeting about, Levinson said. Whats interesting is what is happening in the interaction of tradition and social media. Thats the future. Both conventions took all-of-the-above approaches to technology, creating accounts on every platform available. In the end, then, it was easy to see what worked and what turned out ineffectual. The DNC posted the same message at the same time asking its Facebook fans and its Google+ followers to relate their favorite moments from Tuesdays convention proceedings; the call drew 200 Facebook responses but just six on Google+. Is there a shakeout coming? Yes, Harris said. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Google search were incredibly dominant. Everything else is in the land of the niches. Indeed, there was precious little activity on Pinterest, Flickr or LinkedIn. A notable exception: The DNC posted on Flickr shot of Obama cuddling with his daughters as they watched the first ladys speech from the White House that has drawn more than 186,000 views. A more typical Flickr tally for the DNC, though, was the 2,650 total views for a set of 176 photos posted on Wednesday night. If you can get a compelling photograph, that can have an impact, Nyhan said. But the nature of the convention is that there will be very few compelling photos. Thats the problem with Flickr, Pinterest and Foursquare; theres not much room in there for discussion. Theyre not places people expect to find witty repartee or discussion. Actually, Foursquare had a surprisingly good fortnight. The here-I-am location-based smartphone app paired up with Time magazine for special RNC and DNC programs in which politicians and Time journalists kept users apprised of where they were. Users who checked in on the app while visiting certain locations in the convention cities would earn a special RNC or DNC-related badge, an online collectible of sorts. Even Obama or a staffer on his behalf checked in, albeit on Thursday, a few hours before his acceptance speech. Foursquare doesnt release how many badges are awarded, but more than 12,000 Foursquare users have announced on Twitter that theyd obtained one at one of the conventions. Given that the total attendance at both conventions, including delegates, speakers and the media, was a combined 60,000 people, thats a fairly high level of participation. Those who checked in also encountered Times convention coverage within the app, executive editor and Washington bureau chief Michael Duffy said. Essentially this is another platform to provide Times content, and were always looking for new audiences, Duffy said. Its a way to take our content to where people are. The truest test of what the future looks like, Levinson said, will be when these tools are no longer newsworthy.

By the time we get to 2016, therell be much less talk of what impact social media is having, he said. Itll just be part of the landscape. All Facebook: Obama Supporters Flock to Facebook During Acceptance Speech http://allfacebook.com/obama-acceptance-speech_b99092 Jennifer Moire September 7, 2012 Last week, AllFacebook looked at the reaction on Facebook to Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romneys acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla. As a follow-up, we tracked public posts on Facebook when President Barack Obama had his turn Thursday night in Charlotte, N.C., at the Democratic National Convention. While there was nothing that compared to the empty chair meme, the reaction on the social network was swift and varied. Posts appeared 10 times over and every second. Our informal observations revealed that users from both sides of the aisle joined Facebook to comment, like, and share reaction from multiple platforms and across the U.S. The campaign, as well as advocacy groups, leveraged the sharing power of Facebook and the platforms unique ability to influence voters through the power of friend-to-friend communications. Here are some examples: Obama for America, the campaigns grassroots organizing arm, launched a fundraising appeal midway through the speech. Obamas campaign arm for gay rights posted on marriage equality, intending for it to be shared across Facebook. It also shared this post, urging supports to stand with My President. Facebook users shared news photos of the president delivering his speech as the address unfolded. Romneys campaign used the presidents primetime address to get his supporters fired up via Facebook. And of course, Facebook users werent shy about sharing their feelings for the president, or his remarks. To demonstrate their support on Facebook, users posted applause lines from the speech that friends could like or share, which serves to drive the message home. By the end of the speech, the Obama campaigns Facebook page showed that 2. 6 million users were talking about the president. PBS MediaShift: Mediatwits #55: Twitter, Facebook Rule DNC; Amazons Big Week www.pbs.org/mediashift/2012/09/mediatwits-55-twitter-facebook-rule-dnc-amazons-big-week251.html Mark Glaser September 7, 2012

Welcome to the 55th episode of the Mediatwits podcast, with Mark Glaser and Rafat Ali as co-hosts. This week, we follow up our report from the RNC with three guests at the DNC in Charlotte: Adam Conner from Facebook; Adam Sharp from Twitter; and our MediaShift correspondent Ari Melber. This convention season has been a hit on social media, and we've seen so many numbers and graphics showing popular hashtags and memes. But what will it all mean in the end? Will it move the needle for the election? Also, Amazon has had a banner week, announcing a new line of Kindles, including an illuminated Paperwhite and a larger Kindle Fire. And the company's nemesis Apple was disappointed by a settlement in an e-book price-fixing lawsuit between the states and three large publishers. Where does that leave the other two publishers and Apple, who are continuing their fight in court? Will it lead to cheaper e-book prices? We ask paidContent's Jeff Roberts, as well as MediaShift correspondent Barbara Hernandez. Guest Bios Adam Sharp is Twitter's Senior Manager, Government, News and Social Innovation. He leads a team driving creative use of the platform by governments, political candidates, journalists, non-profit organizations and the faith community. Previously he was executive producer for digital services at C-SPAN and deputy chief of staff for U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu. Ari Melber is an attorney, television commentator and a correspondent for The Nation magazine. During the 2008 presidential election, Melber traveled with the Obama Campaign on special assignment for The Washington Independent. Previously, he served as a Legislative Aide in the U.S. Senate and as a national staff member of the 2004 John Kerry Presidential Campaign. Adam Conner is a Manager for Public Policy in Facebook's Washington DC office, where he focuses on government and political outreach and has directed the company's election efforts since 2007. Previously, Adam was the Director of Online Communications for Congresswoman Louise Slaughter. Jeff Roberts is the legal reporter for the GigaOm's paidContent. He has previously worked for Reuters and written for the New York Time and The Economist. A former practicing lawyer, Jeff specializes in mediarelated copyright, patent and privacy issues. Barbara Hernandez is a correspondent for PBS MediaShift, covering e-book issues. She has more than a decade of experience as a professional journalist and college writing instructor, and she also writes for Press:Here, NBC Bay Area's technology blog. mediatwits55.mp3 Subscribe to the podcast here Subscribe to Mediatwits via iTunes Follow @TheMediatwits on Twitter here Our show is now on Stitcher! Listen to us on your iPhone, Android Phone, Kindle Fire and other devices with Stitcher. Find Stitcher in your app store or at stitcher.com. Intro and outro music by 3 Feet Up; mid-podcast music by Autumn Eyes via Mevio's Music Alley.

Here are some highlighted topics from the show: Intro 1:00: Big news in the political world and gadget world 1:30: New devices coming from Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Amazon and Apple 4:20: Rafat: Are we only hearing our viewpoints echoed on social media? 6:15: Rundown of topics on our show Twitter, Facebook rule DNC 7:00: Special guests Adam Sharp, Adam Conner, Ari Melber 10:30: Sharp: Special #DNC2012 Twitter page highlights tweets that get most response, with some editorial judgment 13:10: Conner: People on Facebook distribute their own news about conventions 16:10: Melber: Fact-checking tweets gaining currency, going viral during conventions 18:30: Sharp: Twitter sentiment for candidates does mirror polls 21:30: Melber: The press has addict behavior when it comes to political conventions 24:30: Conner: We see a lot of use on Facebook for political organizing, including new app from Obama campaign Amazon's big week 26:20: Special guests Jeff Roberts and Barbara Hernandez 29:10: Roberts: Big surprise that judge approved the e-book price-fixing settlement 31:30: Hernandez: Will Amazon go back to selling e-books cheaper? 32:20: Roberts: Amazon gaining power; publishers hate them for keeping data on customers 34:20: Mark: Shouldn't price of e-book be cheaper than hardback book? PandoDaily: The Biggest Tech Themes of the Democratic National Convention http://pandodaily.com/2012/09/07/the-biggest-tech-themes-of-the-democratic-national-convention/ Hamish McKenzie September 7, 2012

Ive got to admit I underestimated just how significant a presence the tech industry and startup community would have at the Democratic National Convention. And from what I heard, that presence was just as significant at the Republican convention. As talk of building an innovation economy intensifies, it seems that both the political set and techies are waking up to their mutual challenges and opportunities, in a way that should benefit both. From the ground in Charlotte this week, some clear tech themes emerged. These were the most important. Emphasis on Innovation As well as many informal discussions about the importance of innovation to the American economy including the Huffington Posts What Is Working panel and a bunch of panels hosted by The Ppl that covered everything from gaming to government former President Bill Clinton paid it special attention in his prime-time speech. Key takeaway line: I want a [President] who believes with no doubt that we can build a new American Dream economy, driven by innovation and creativity, by education and yes by cooperation. Emphasis on Education One of the major policy issues for startups and tech giants alike is developing and educating talent for the future, especially in science, technology, engineering, and math (the so-called STEM fields). The education theme was a big feature of speeches by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, Bill Clinton, and the President himself. Patrick: But those Orchard Gardens kids should not be left on their own. Those children are Americas children, too, yours and mine. And among them are the future scientists, entrepreneurs, teachers, artists, engineers, laborers and civic leaders we desperately need. Clinton: We know that investments in education and infrastructure and scientific and technological research increase growth. They increase good jobs, and they create new wealth for all the rest of us. President Obama: And together, I promise you we can out-educate and out-compete any country on Earth. Help me recruit 100,000 math and science teachers in the next ten years, and improve early childhood education. Help give two million workers the chance to learn skills at their community college that will lead directly to a job. Help us work with colleges and universities to cut in half the growth of tuition costs over the next ten years. We can meet that goal together. Startup Culture A startup group led by EventFarm, HyperVocal, and Fighter Interactive made sure that convention attendees knew there is such a thing as a startup community in this country. The informal organization, called StartUp RockOn, hosted a big opening night party featuring The Roots, nightly VIP sessions in the late hours

(including performances by Talib Kweli and ELEW), a startup challenge, and several meet-and-greet sessions. It was also involved in the aforementioned series of panels, which included discussions on innovation in journalism, innovation in digital media, government and startups, and innovation in gaming. The Tech Presence Google hosted a bunch of panels, staged Hangouts, demonstrated its self-driving car, and took up half a city block with a stack of colorful shipping crates converted into a giant working space and meeting zone. Facebook hosted an Apps & Drinks meet-and-greet session with demonstrations from local startups, and a dinner-and-drinks session in a crowded restaurant. (A local Charlotte magazine blogged more details of what Google and Facebook did in Charlotte, in case youre interested.) Microsoft was on site giving demonstrations, participating in panels, and sponsoring startup events. Twitter sat on panels and had something called a #DNC2012 Nest that I never actually saw. Tumblr hosted a Wednesday night watch party with free drinks and tacos and tumbled both conventions. Substantive Discussion Between the Startup Community and Politicians This happened behind closed doors and at breakfasts I wasnt invited to, but I was assured it happened. (More on this in a post later today.) Instagram Party conventions are carefully orchestrated events that are primed for maximum visual impact for TV audiences. This year, those efforts were undercut somewhat by the thousands of attendees who recorded the week by Instagram, giving us a glimpse at what the convention looks like from behind the scenes. Heres an example courtesy of TrsSugar. Twitter Even from Charlotte, it was clear that most of the discussion about the convention was actually happening in the form of tweets. It didnt matter how loud it got in the Time Warner Cable Arena, all the noise was on Twitter, and tweets-per-minute became one of the most important metrics of the convention. Some quick data:

52,756 the peak number of tweets per minute related to President Obamas speech 9.5 million total number of tweets related to the Democratic National Convention 4 million number of tweets about the convention on its final day 4 million total number of tweets about the Republican National Convention

PandoDaily: Startups Get Political: How Engine Advocacy is Bridging Washington and the Valley http://pandodaily.com/2012/09/07/startups-get-political-how-engine-advocacy-is-bridging-washington-andthe-valley/

Hamish McKenzie September 7, 2012 Mike McGeary meets me at a downtown Charlotte cafe in what counts for an early morning start at the Democratic National Convention this week: 11am. Like others from the Bay Area and the startup community a term Im going to have to keep using in its broadest sense throughout this piece he has had a series of late nights, assiduously attending the late-night VIP parties hosted by StartUp RockOn in a trendy art gallery on the fringes of the citys downtown core. McGeary, who is 28, is wearing his brown hair gathered into a small peak, thick-rimmed hipster spectacles, and a thick but trimmed beard cradles his chin and creeps halfway up his face. On his red T-shirt is a butchers map of a pig, except all of its sections are labeled bacon. I like to tell people this is an aspirational T-shirt, he jokes. This guy is one of the most important voices for startups in the political sphere. McGeary is co-founder and political strategist of Engine Advocacy, an advocacy group cum think tank that represents the interests of entrepreneurial communities from across the country. McGeary, who has a background in politics, started Engine with Josh Mendelsohn, who he had worked with at Palo Alto-based online music startup TuneIn, and Joshua To. Mendelsohn and To also co-founded a venture capital firm called Hattery, which pays McGearys salary. Engine is based in San Francisco, claims more than 300 startups as its members, and has five employees. This month, it celebrates its first anniversary. McGeary has been representing the group at both the Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention, talking to politicians, schmoozing with their staff, and helping push forward an agenda for a part of the tech industry that isnt represented by Google, Microsoft, or Facebook, all of which have established lobby groups in Washington DC. This it the first time, as far as McGeary knows, that the startup community has had a significant presence at the conventions. In fact, it is probably the first sustained and coordinated push for an organized group of startups acting in politics period. This year has seen some groundbreaking political developments that directly affect the startup community, and Engine has been involved with them all: the dumping of the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), which would have implemented severe curbs on Internet freedom and innovation in the name of copyright protection; the passing of the JOBS Act, which allows startups to seek investment through crowdfunding; and the tabling of the Startup Act, which would encourage the import of highlyskilled immigrants who want to start companies in the US. Thats a lot of work for a one-year-old, and its strange now to look back and think that startups wouldnt be represented in the forming, or destruction, of these landmark pieces of legislation had Engine not been around. But entrepreneurs have long been reluctant to get involved in politics beyond cursory advocacy and contributions for social issues. But McGeary says there has been a seismic shift, and startups are now starting to pay more attention to the political climate. For a long time, *for+ small or large or in-between [startups] in the Valley or in entrepreneurial communities, it was just Let me do my job. It was, Just dont get in the way, and if youre right on social issues, Ill write you a check, he says. Entrepreneurs preferred to dedicate their attention and resources to their products. When youre hiring that fifth employee, youre not hiring a government relations flack straight out of law school.

But SOPA was a turning point. Had the bill passed, it could have allowed law enforcement to block entire Internet domains based on the actions of unrelated, individual users on a single Web page. It could also have undermined the safe harbor provided by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows Internet companies to get away with hosting copyright content on their sites as long as they remove infringing content as soon as they have been alerted. After SOPA, people understood that they could not sit back anymore and just put their head down, look at their product, and hope and pray that they wouldnt get regulated out of existence, McGeary says. In Charlotte this week, Ive been struck by the odd optics of the laidback startup culture attempting to mesh with buttoned-up political culture. At the start of the week, I reported on the efforts of a group called StartUp RockOn, which brought a travelling showcase of parties and meet-and-greets to both the Democratic and Republican conventions. While the night-time activities seemed to be well patronized by young convention attendees, some of the panels and events such as Tumblrs Wednesday night watch party didnt draw crowds. And the hard-partying entrepreneur set seemed far removed from the senators and policy wonks that were holding forth at other events, both public and private, throughout the week. On a metaphorical level, Silicon Valley and Washington DC occupy very different worlds, and it hasnt been clear from this convention that those worlds have been fully bridged, or will be for some time. Matthew Slutsky, who heads up partnerships for Change.org, told me at an event hosted by Emilys List that some politicians straight-up dont understand where the techies are coming from. I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that they dont get it, Slutsky said. He recounted a scene from an Apps & Drinks event hosted by Facebook the previous day in which the New York Senator Charles Schumer wandered around the room looking at various products with which he was deeply unfamiliar. He clearly had no idea of what any of them do, how to talk about any of them, and he was just wide-eyed looking at this, like a kid in the candy store. It was actually really interesting to see. Luckily, though, most Congressmen have staff around them who very well understand technology issues, Slutsky said. There have been so many amazing strides. McGeary says Engines goal is to educate entrepreneurial communities about how Washington DC works, and vice versa. It has sometimes been a tough task. Government is deliberate, and teaching that to the Valley has been hard because its just anathema to the way we think, says McGeary. But in the same way, government looks at Silicon Valley and says, We dont understand the breakneck speed. You guys are going at 400,000 miles a minute. I dont know whats going on, I dont know what the hell a dongle is, much less where and how that works. But we teach them about that at the same time. So far, he hasnt encountered too many difficulties with the cultural collision. When he attended a breakfast hosted by Senator Patrick Leahy on Wednesday, he dressed up by wearing a polo shirt. But he insists fashion shouldnt matter. If Im going to them with economic data that suggests my industry is creating all the net job growth in this country, and theyre not going to take me seriously because I have a pig on my Tshirt that says bacon, thats a problem, he says. The good news is, I havent found that yet. With SOPA, the JOBS Act, and the Startup Act, it has been a hectic and crazily successful first year for Engine. McGeary, however, isnt prepared to relax. While the Presidency enters its lame duck phase, Engine will be upping the ante on its economic research, placing particular emphasis on the spread of tech jobs and how theyre affecting the economy. As good as the first year has been, its the first year of a much longer fight, he says. Engine will continue to educate government and startups at all levels and build a stronger lobby. No

matter who becomes the next President of the United States, those goals will only become ever more important. We are on the edge of something, but its been growing for 10 years and we just havent paid attention to it, says McGeary. Its beyond time for us to focus our efforts in terms of helping the startup community in strengthening our efforts to grow the economy at this level, because this is exactly the kind of growth that either candidate in this race will tell you is important. BuzzFeed: The Democratic Convention By the Facebook Numbers http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/the-democratic-convention-by-the-facebook-numbers Andrew Kaczynski September 7, 2012 Barack Obama's speech was mentioned 192% times as often as Mitt Romney's and 40% more than the second-most mentioned moment, Bill Clintons speech. Barack Obama's speech led to an 800% increases in mentions of "Obama" on Facebook. The top ten convention moments in terms of total mention count were.... 1) President Obamas Speech 2) Bill Clintons Speech 3) Michelle Obamas Speech 4) Mitt Romneys Speech 5) Clint Eastwoods Speech 6) Paul Ryans Speech 7) Joe Bidens Speech 8) Ann Romneys Speech 9) Chris Christies Speech 10) Marco Rubios Speech The last night of the DNC went up against the MTV Video Music Awards. Here are the mentions of politicians vs. rock stars. 1) President Obama 2) President Clinton 3) First Lady Michelle Obama 4) Mitt Romney 5) One Direction 6) Clint Eastwood 7) Lil Wayne 8) Vice President Joe Biden 9) Taylor Swift and Frank Ocean (Tie) 10) Ann Romney

CNN: 5 OMG Moments at the DNC http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/07/politics/5-omg-moments-at-the-dnc/index.html Dorrine Mendoza September 7, 2012 (CNN) -- Anyone can turn on a TV, scan a newsfeed or fire up a laptop to get a sense of the important topics that were discussed at this week's Democratic National Convention. This is not about those important topics. 1. Biden goes off-script, literally Grammarians and wordsmiths everywhere cringed as Vice President Joe Biden used the word literally instead of figuratively several times during his Thursday speech. The text of Biden's prepared remarks did not include the offending word. His speech went something like this: "Look, Barack understood that the search for (Osama) bin Laden was about a lot more than taking a monstrous leader off the battlefield. It was about so much more than that. It was about righting an unspeakable wrong. It was about -- literally -- it was about healing an unbearable wound, a nearly unbearable wound in America's heart." @rickklein tweeted, "Joe Biden literally thinks 'literally' means 'figuratively.' " @indecision suggested, "Literally #drink" "If you take a drink every time Biden says 'literally' you literally will be passed out by the time Obama takes the stage. #dnc2012" tweeted @brfreed. Politico reported the Obama campaign bought this promoted tweet to run when users search for "literally." "Vice President @JoeBiden: Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive." However, it was no longer appearing when searched following the conclusion of the convention. 2. U.S.A.! U.S.A.! Sure, bin Laden's death represented more than the fulfillment of a promise or the resolve of America. But the explosion of "U.S.A.!" chants at the mention of his demise made some uncomfortable. "Ah, really didn't like that line Mr. Pres. "Osama bin Laden is dead." (Crowd cheers) Death should never be a celebration," tweeted @MichaelHarris_. "Not sure anyone has gotten louder cheers tonight than dead Osama bin Laden," posted @bethreinhard. 3. Getting social President Barack Obama's statement, "I'm no longer just the candidate, I'm the President," drove a record 43,646 tweets per minute.

@gov released these figures, "A new record political moment on Twitter: @barackobama drives 52,757 tweets per minute. Over 9 million tweets sent about #DNC2012" Imagine Michelle Obama bragging someday how she beat the president's tweets-per-minute record only to have her brother, Craig Robinson, set her straight over a family dinner. "Barack Obama" was the most mentioned political term Thursday night on Facebook, 40% higher than Bill Clinton mentions Wednesday, Facebook officials told CNN. Obama mentions were 192% higher than Mitt Romney mentions on the night of his acceptance speech, they said. 4. We cried Former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords received an emotional reception Thursday night as she recited the Pledge of Allegiance at the convention. Giffords survived a gunshot wound to the head in a 2011 attack that killed six people and wounded 13 others, including the lawmaker, during a constituent meet-and-greet in Tucson, Arizona. "Gabby Giffords just led the Pledge of Allegiance at #2012DNC and made me cry. #hero," tweeted @ElizabethBanks. Speaking of heroes, @CoryBooker posted, "Ok, now Gabby Giffords just made me cry. What a testimony to strength, resilience, perseverance and beauty!" 5. The conventions are finally over No one said it would be easy. Literally. CNN: CNNs Gut Check for September 7, 2012 http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/07/cnns-gut-check-for-september-7-2012-2/ Mark Preston and Michelle Jaconi September 7, 2012 NN's GUT CHECK | for September 7, 2012| 5 p.m. - n. a pause to assess the state, progress or condition of the political news cycle BREAKING: WHILE CLINTON TOPS OBAMA IN SPEECH REVIEWS, OBAMA BEATS HIM IN THE RATINGS... While we wait for official Nielsen numbers, the preliminary ratings data shows that cumulatively, across broadcast and cable news networks, 29 million television viewers watched President Obama's speech last night from 10 p.m. to 11:15 p.m. (CNN beat out ABC, and CBS, as well as all cable networks, thanks to your loyal viewership). On Wednesday night, up against fierce competition from the NFL, former president Bill Clinton's speech attracted an estimated 25 million viewers vs. an average 23.9 million viewers for the key football game. OBAMA EKES OUT A WIN ON FACEBOOK AS WELL... Politics beat out pop culture Thursday night on Facebook. President Barack Obama was mentioned more times overall than MTVs Video Music Awards show, which aired the same evening as the final night of the Democratic National Convention. According to Facebooks Talk Meter, which measures the amount of buzz a person or event gets on Facebook, Obamas Thursday night speech edged out former President Bill Clintons Wednesday night

address, while both speeches ranked higher than their competitors in primetime the MTVs Video Music Awards on Thursday and the National Football Leagues season opener on Wednesday. Even though Obama won overall buzz, Clinton garnered more buzz from user about the age of 45. Eric Weisbrod DEVELOPING: CAMPAIGNS SPIN THE DISMAL AUGUST JOBS REPORT Friday's jobs report indicating only 96,000 jobs were created in August brought a quick end to any lingering Democratic euphoria from this week's party convention, bringing into sharp reality the challenges President Barack Obama will face in the two months remaining until Election Day. Kevin Liptak 11:44 a.m. ET: Mitt Romney at a media availability in Iowa: After the party last night, the hangover today. The jobs numbers were very disappointing. For almost every net new job created, approximately four people dropped out of the workforce. Seeing that kind of report is obviously disheartening to the American people who need work and are having a hard time finding work. 1:04 p.m. ET: President Barack Obama at a campaign event in New Hampshire: Today, we learned that after losing 800,000 jobs a month when I took office, business once again added jobs for the 30th month in a row for a total of 4.6 million jobs. But that's not good enough. We know it is not good enough. We need to create more jobs faster. We need to fill the hole left by the recession faster, and we need to come out of the crisis stronger. TRAIL TRIVIA (Answer below) This years Democratic National Convention was three days long as was the Republican National. What was the longest Democratic convention in history? MARK (@PrestonCNN) & MICHELLE (@MJaconiCNN) What caught our eye today in politics We love what we do. Covering politics is our calling, but also a thrill, as we live to kick the tires of the men and women who want to lead this amazing country we call home. Nowhere is this combined passion and patriotism more celebrated than the quadrennial political conventions. Now with 16 conventions between us, we were struck by two things that made this cycle distinct: 1) the contrast between the two parties' conventions was starker than ever. And 2) the pace of the news cycle and the campaign has made the coverage and the message harder to keep up with. First, we wish all Americans could attend both conventions, as there are so many differences between the organization and surrounding events that help inform an inquisitive mind. Sure, they both have things in common, and scouting out the future talent is one of the most rewarding parts of the whole week. This year, as the quadrennial question of "will they get a bounce" becomes the topic du jour, we were struck by how much the cycle of the political year has changed. "It used to be that Labor Day was the traditional kick-off of the campaign," a senior Obama campaign official told us. "This year, we're in the fourth quarter." It is true, that the pace, as in all facets of our life, has accelerated. For journalists, the deadlines were relentless with all platforms demanding publication and insights from short, pithy tweets to long essays designed to break through the noise. Even so, it is our journalistic pleasure to once again smack down the notion that conventions are somehow pass. As the veteran journalist Al Hunt said at his surprise party this week, "I love politicians. I think public

service is a noble calling ... and if neurosurgeons and dentists can have conventions every year, why can't politicians every four?" So, as we leave you to head to the airport, we want to salute the staffers behind those politicians who have found a way to keep up with the pace of modern campaigning in a way that has magnified their influence. Once again, we partnered with Klout to rank the top five Democratic strategists according to Klout's scale of 100. And once again, we removed CNN contributors even though some of them, including Donna Brazile, Paul Begala and Hilary Rosen deserve a shout-out for their use of social media to get their message across. Top Five List of Democratic Strategists, Ranked by Klout: 1. David Axelrod, @davidaxelrod 85 2. Jim Messina, @Messina2012 80 3. Stephanie Cutter, @stefcutter 79 4. Dan Pfeiffer, @pfeiffer44 78 5. Mitch Stewart, @mitch_stewart 76 the LEDE Did you miss it? Leading CNNPolitics: Post-convention campaigns get under way Now it begins. All over again. The primary season over and the nominating conventions complete, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama hit the ground running Friday for the final stretch of a campaign that began, for Romney at least, more than a year ago in Iowa. Over the next 60 days of campaigning, much of it focusing on key battleground states, the two men will pitch their visions for the country to a divided electorate. Michael Pearson Leading Drudge: 8.1%, +96,000, Fed Set To Pump, 368,000 Dropped Out, 88,921,000 'Not In Labor Force' Jobs growth slowed sharply in August, setting the stage for the Federal Reserve to pump additional money into the sluggish economy next week and dealing a blow to President Barack Obama as he seeks re-election. Nonfarm payrolls increased only 96,000 last month, the Labor Department said on Friday. Lucia Mutikani Leading HuffPo: Simpson-Bowles References In Obama, Biden DNC Speeches Vex Media, Progressives Journalists here are homing in on Vice President Joe Biden's criticism of the GOP for not supporting any of the deficit-reduction proposals over the past year, noting that President Barack Obama did not embrace a report put out by the co-chairs of the Simpson-Bowles panel. ABC's Jake Tapper, for instance, called the following, from Biden, an "incredible line." Ryan Grim Leading Politico: Two conventions tell the tale of 2012 Republicans last week in Tampa and Democrats this week in Charlotte were not faking it. Partisans on both sides really do regard the other partys nominee with contempt, and both sides look at the others agenda with genuine incomprehension. John F. Harris and Jim Vandehei Leading The New York Times: Joblessness May Undermine Obama Convention Bump Presidential candidates can usually count on luxuriating in a few days of warm feelings from their convention as they ride the high generated by impassioned supporters and cross their fingers for rising poll numbers. Jim Rutenberg

TRAIL MOMENTS The political bites of the day You dont know me SARAH PALIN IN AN INTERVIEW ON FOX BUSINESS NETWORK: "I think he diminished himself by even mentioning my name. How does he even know my name? I mean, aren't these guys supposed to be these big wig elites who don't waste their time on little people like me representing the average American." Dem says the convention seemed more emotional BEAU BIDEN, JOE BIDENS SON AND THE ATTORNEY GENERAL OF DELAWARE, IN AN INTERVIEW WITH STARTING POINT: The whole convention seemed more emotional to me. There was a great energy obviously in 2008. It was a whirlwind for our family. My dad had just gotten a call. My mom rebuilt our family. Everybody up here has gone through something. And we went through something in 1972. Ann talks horse sense ANN ROMNEY AT A CAMPAIGN EVENT IN VIRGINIA: I should tell you I feel right at home because I am in a barn. (laughs) So, lets talk some horse sense. Barack Obama said four years ago if I cant turn this economy around after three-and-a-half years I am looking at a one term presidency. Well, it is our turn to the economy around and I know Mitt can do it. TRIVIA ANSWER If three days is too long, then no one wants to go back to 1924. The 1924 Democratic National Convention, at Madison Square Garden in New York lasted a whopping 17 days. It took a record 103 ballots to nominate John W. Davis for president and Charles W. Bryan for vice president. Davis was in large part a compromise-candidate when no one could agree on whether to nominate Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo and Gov. Al Smith. In the general election, Davis and Bryan were defeated by Republican Calvin Coolidge. The real historic moment from the 1924 Democratic convention was the unwanted participation of Klu Klux Klan members. In a resurgence of the Klan, the bigoted group gained political power in the Deep South and some mountain states, leading some members to become Democratic delegates. When Gov. Smith was nominated - a Roman Catholic - the Klan grew incensed. During the convention, the Klan organized a protest in New Jersey that featured thousands of hooded Klansmen. The protest led some to become fearful of Klan and Anti-Klan clashes in Madison Square Garden. GUT CHECK WINNERS CIRCLE (why arent you in it) Congratulations to Daniel Holt (@DanielHoltdb) for correctly answering todays Gut Check trivia question. Holt was correct when he tweeted 1924 Democratic National Convention. Happy Friday all. CNN: Obama Outshines MTVs Music Awards on Facebook http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/07/obama-outshines-mtvs-music-awards-on-facebook/

Eric Weisbrod September 7, 2012 Washington (CNN) - Politics beat out pop culture Thursday night on Facebook. President Barack Obama was mentioned more times overall than MTV's Video Music Awards show, which aired the same evening as the final night of the Democratic National Convention. It wasn't just Obama who was discussed more than the VMA's, former President Bill Clinton, first lady Michelle Obama, and Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney were all discussed more than stars of Thursday night's music awards like One Direction and Lil Wayne. Vice President Joe Biden didn't get as many mentions as those pop stars, but he did surpass Taylor Swift and rapper Frank Ocean in overall mentions.

Besides overall mentions, Obama also gained the largest jump in buzz on Facebook among all political figures and news events in the last two weeks. According to Facebook's "Talk Meter" analysis, which assigns a number to a person or event's magnitude on a 1-10 scale, Barack Obama registered the highest with a 7.28, gaining more momentum than not just the VMA awards, but also NFL season opener and Hurricane Isaac. Here are the full "Talk Meter" rankings, which aren't scientific and don't measure sentiment, but provide a glimpse which topics are gaining the most steam among Facebook's 160 million U.S. users. 1. Barack Obama 7.28 2. Democratic National Convention overall 7.09 3. Bill Clinton 7.08 4. Republican National Convention overall 6.82 5. MTV Video Music Awards 6.67 6. NFL season opener 6.41 7. Clint Eastwood 5.46 8. Hurricane Isaac 5.24 9. Michelle Obama 5.06 10. Mitt Romney 5.04 11. Joe Biden 4.87 12. Condoleezza Rice 4.29 13. Paul Ryan 4.27 14. Ann Romney 4.12 15. Julian Castro 3.69 16. Marco Rubio 3.57 17. Chris Christie 3.53 18. Elizabeth Warren 3.45 While President Obama edged out former President Bill Clinton in overall buzz, Bill Clinton ranked higher among users age 45 and older, who were all of voting age when he was elected president. Obama's jump in chatter was highest in Washington, DC, North Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana & Georgia. When looking at overall mentions, Obama on Thursday was talked about 40% more than Bill Clinton was on Wednesday, and 192% more than Romney last Thursday when he gave his convention speech. Obama's Facebook mentions have remained high throughout the Democratic convention, but his acceptance speech resulted in a nearly 800% increase in mentions of his name.

While Vice President Joe Biden ranked significantly lower than the President on the Talk Meter scale, he did gain a bigger jump than Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan. This may be related to the fact that Rep. Ryan's name had already been discussed in the news more than Biden's in recent weeks. The amount of chatter about Biden popped the most among users ages 55-64. For more raw data on who is discussing the candidates on Facebook, check out the Facebook CNN Election Insights tool at www.cnn.com/fbinsights. Campaigns & Elections: Cementing Social Medias Place in the Campaign World http://www.campaignsandelections.com/magazine/us-edition/327317/cementing-social-mediaand39splace-in-the-campaign-world.thtml Facebooks Politics and Government Team September 7, 2012 Politics and governing in the United States have always been social. Long before people started connecting with each other online they were meeting in town squares, coffee shops, and around water coolers to discuss important issues of the day. From Paul Reveres midnight ride to whistle-stop tours made famous by Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, our country has always cherished the act of meeting, talking, and organizing. By expanding the sphere of engagement and fostering a genuine dialogue between politicians and constituents, social media carries on the tradition of inclusive political debate in America. We knowand politicians do toothat Facebook and other social media give people another way to get engaged with their elected representatives. Interactivity with candidatesa privilege once reserved for high-level donors and political insidersis now an expectation of voters and a priority for campaigns. In 2008, when then-Sen. Barack Obama leaned heavily on social media to build a movement behind his candidacy, his move was hailed as groundbreaking. Now, only four years later, nearly every single candidate for public office from president of the United States to city council is harnessing social medias power. Today, were witnessing candidates like U.S. Senate hopeful Ted Cruz in Texas defeat better-funded opponents in part thanks to their savvy use of Facebook and the Internet to interact with voters, raise money, and push voters to the polls. Over the past four years, the Facebook Politics & Government Team has focused on continuing the evolution in the electoral sphere and now, almost every aspect of the political environment has become more social. The Washington D.C. office started in late 2007 with just one person, Adam Conner, who was tasked with the job of introducing Facebook to elected officials and candidates. In 2011, the team scaled up as we prepared for the Republican presidential nomination battle and the general election season. Weve found that our team works best with candidates, campaigns, and elected officials through partnerships. Our office does a significant amount of outreach to show them how effectively theyre reaching their intended audience and share some smart tactics (such as posting more photos or images between 9-10p.m.) that might help them engage more people and grow their likes. Sometimes this outreach is done in one-on-one meetings or at larger, organized gatherings.

The politicians that do best on Facebook are the ones who are personally invested in their digital strategy and integrate it into all aspects of their campaigns. Examples of this include the Obama campaign and House Republican leaders such as Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthyeach of whom visited Facebook headquarters in 2011 to learn more about what we do and how they can apply it to governing. The relationship with House leadership paved the way for our first-ever bipartisan Congressional Hackathon last December. Partnering with offices, being available to answer their questions, and providing a steady stream of ideas on how they can be using our platform better is how our team has worked to earn the trust of politicians and their staffers. Theyve discovered that Facebook allows them to bypass the mainstream media filter and talk to citizens directly to engage them in the policymaking process. Theyve also discovered that the best digital strategy is an integrated one that works in tandem with everything else they are doing. The time the largest number of people are engaging on Facebook is during prime time TV viewing hours, and the smartest campaigns run their ads on TV and also on Facebook. That way a constituent might see a commercial on TV and get that message reinforced with a Facebook ad that tells them which of their friends support that candidate. Expect even greater political engagement as an increasing number of Facebook users turn their online political activity into offline action. A June 2011 Pew study showed that Facebook users two and a half times more likely to attend a political rally, and were 53 percent more likely to vote. Frequent Facebook users were also nearly six times as likely to have attended a political meeting they found through Facebook. Successive studies have shown that engaging with political activity on Facebook encourages a person to become more involved. Infrastructure will soon catch up to this trend, as it already has in Washington State, where citizens can now register to vote via Facebook. The future of politics will be marked by the ability of Americans to engage with the political process in productive ways through social networks once considered mere. The world becomes more open and connected when we share information with each other, and the political process is not exempt from the ever-increasing push for transparency and accountability. People enabled by technology continue to advance the idea of the public commons enshrined in our Constitution and our political institutions. We think thats a great thing. Tech Crunch: Underdog no more: how Romneys digital director, Zac Moffatt, got silicon valley power the campaign http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/07/how-romneys-digital-director-zac-moffatt-got-silicon-valley-brightestminds-to-work-for-the-campaign/ Gregory Ferenstein September 7, 2012 As a campaign we would not presume to know more than the collective intelligence and resources of the marketplace. We find the best firms in the country and glue them together to achieve our goals, says Zac Moffatt, Mitt Romneys Digital Director. Without the luxury of a 4 year head start to build out its own campaign tools, Moffatt has won digital parity with the Obama juggernaut by partnering with the brightest Silicon Valley firms. For instance, though Obama has 4 times the number of Facebook fans, both Romney and Obama have similar levels of users actively commenting and sharing content online.

From partnering with Square to turn each Romney activist into a mobile fundraiser to getting Googlers to give up their famous 20% time for the campaign*, Moffatt has leveraged Silicon Valleys brightest minds, mostly for free, to give the once digital underdog some much-deserved tech cred. Facebook And Google Power Republican candidate Mitt Romney is leading President Barack Obama in Facebook engagement and new Likes, wrote the social media blog, InsideFacebook, in a highly contentious post about the superiority of Romneys social media prowess. Among many impressive Facebook strategies, Writer Brittany Darwell noticed that team Romney was exploiting a brand new feature, sponsored results, which displays Romneys Facebook page when users look for Obama or Democrat. But, it would be difficult for any brand, especially a national campaign, to so quickly exploit Facebooks constantly changing ad system. Moffatt explains that it was the Facebook team, itself, that has been instrumental in giving the Romney campaign its edge. The Romney team has been quick to adopt new products and features and provide valuable feedback on how we might make those tools better, says Jamie Smolski, a Facebook Politics & Government team member. The reason for Facebooks close ties to Moffatt are simple: political campaigns are a delicious proving ground of data and experimentation. They have to move quick, reach every imaginable audience, and excite users most passionate beliefs. A source close to Facebook tells us that Romneys national campaign has provided great data for their foray into mobile. The mobile advertising cash-cow has famously eluded Facebook, even though over 500 million users check-in with cellphones each month. Moffatt tells us that hes managed to get a whopping 10% click through rate on their targeted mobile advertising, ten times higher than Facebooks average. Its success like this that makes it a no-brainer for Facebook to tip Moffatt off to every imaginable upcoming feature. Mobile users seem especially valuable to campaigns. You know who the power mobile users of Facebook are?, asks Moffatt, stay-at-home moms. Young, single voters have notoriously low turnout rates, so political campaigns salivate over the 35+ demographic that has both the time and technology-savvy to get their coveted friends engaged online. And, to their credit, team Romney has had pitch-perfect timing funneling the impulsive civic rage of power moms into meaningful engagement. For instance, when Obama campaign advisor Hilary Rosen made headlines with the assertion that Mitt Romneys wife, Ann Romney never worked a day in her life, Moffatt had Ann Romney respond on Twitter and Facebook. In just a few days, Moffett recalls, Ann Romney was overflowing with 85,000 engaged users. In 48 hours, we created the single largest coalition, on the conservative side of the country, from scratch, on the only platform which could achieve this, which is Facebook. Facebook isnt the only major player in Moffatts Silicon Valley brain trust. A few experts from Googles website traffic analytics team have donated their valuable 20% time, a time allotted to all Google employees to work on experimental projects. While its difficult to know how the Google partnership has helped the Romney campaign (since unlike Facebook, Google activity is private), web search traffic could be even more valuable, as users searching for information are often actively looking to get involved in some way. We never wanted to be that were not engaging the best minds to be successful, concludes Moffatt. Walking Billboards and Events Silicon Valley partnerships have helped team Romney bolster two of the oldest forms of campaigning: merchandising and events. Mobile credit card reader, Square, built the campaign a custom Federal Elections

Commission-compliant app that helped turn their Republican National Convention volunteers into an army of walking cashiers. Every t-shirt sold not only refills their coffers, but turns supporters into walking billboards. Nothing is more about believing in a cause than when you are willing to wear a campaigns merchandise on your body, says Moffatt, Its a very public validation. So, how much money did Square help rake in? A knowledgeable campaign official tells TechCrunch that the official Romney pop-up stores did well into the seven figures, during the convention. The same partnership-happy philosophy led Moffatt to team up with popular event organizing startup, Eventbrite. While Obamas team has chosen to build out much of their own technology for offline engagement, Moffatt says that we would rather go to someone who wakes up every morning and worries about event-ticketing. Recently released data from Eventbrite seems to confirm that the partnership has paid off: Republicans hold 42% more events than Democrats through Eventbrite (71% vs. 29%), Republican gatherings have an average of 14 more people (68 vs. 42) and 14% more events have been community-driven and free in battleground states, such as Colorado and Florida (77% vs. 63%). It should be noted that Eventbrite represents some unknown fraction of the total political events nationwide, and the Democrats earn a lot more per event sale ($115 vs. $31, which likely decreases overall turnout). But, in fulfilling Romneys need to go from winning the Republican primary to competing on a national scale with the Obama digital juggernaut, the Eventbrite partnership clearly helped them scale effectively. The tired stereotype of Republican luddites just doesnt seem to hold true anymore. After a sound defeat by Obama in 2008, Republicans made a concerted effort to hire and promote their ardent geeks. Romney was no exception: Moffatt was given access to fully integrate digital through the entire campaign, and hire a large team of power players, such as open-government champion, Matt Lira, to bring some much needed experimentation to the ever-evolving communication landscape. The Romney campaigns experience is an important lesson for businesses and government everywhere: give power to smart geeks. Invariably, your geekiest employees and their friends will astound you. All Facebook: Obama Bests Romney in Facebook Mentions During Both Conventions http://allfacebook.com/obama-romney-mentions-conventions_b98935 Jennifer Moire September 6, 2012 Mentions of President Barack Obama on Facebook bested those of Republican challenger Mitt Romney by almost a two-to-one margin during the two weeks of the presidential nominating conventions that come to a close Thursday night. The data on the most-mentioned moments during the conventions in the Facebook era of presidential politics come just as Obama is set to accept his partys nomination for a second time at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C. Facebook cited the speeches by first lady Michelle Obama and keynote speaker and San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro on the first night of the convention as the key moments that drove the presidents mentions to increase by 745 percent from the baseline mentions he received in previous hours.

Its worth noting that the data were released before former President Bill Clintons rousing nominating speech Wednesday night. Romneys acceptance of his partys presidential nomination ranks as the second-most-mentioned moment of the conventions. His speech Thursday, Aug. 30, led to a mention count on Facebook that was the secondhighest across conventions to date, with a baseline increase of 422 percent from mentions in previous hours. Among the other most-mentioned events from the past two weeks of presidential nominating conventions:

Michelle Obamas speech Tuesday night resulted in a 5,400 percent bump in Facebook mentions as compared with the baseline established in the hours leading up to her emotional address, which ranks third among most mentioned events of the conventions. Eastwooding: Clint Eastwoods buzzed-about speech to an empty chair on the final night of the GOP convention resulted in a baseline increase of 8,900 percent. The actor was a surprise guest and, therefore, there werent as many mentions on Facebook ahead of his now-infamous speech that put him fourth among most-mentioned events of the 2012 conventions. Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryans red-meat-laden speech Wednesday, Aug, 29, ranks as the fifth-most-mentioned moment from the conventions. There was a 2,280 percent increase over the amounts of mentions in previous hours.

Readers: What do you think of these numbers? Did you take to Facebook during any of these moments of the 2012 conventions? All Facebook: Facebook Abuzz After Ex-President Bill Clintons Nomination Speech at DNC http://allfacebook.com/bill-clinton-nomination-speech_b99012 David Cohen September 6, 2012 President Barack Obama may be the focus of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., this week, but it was ex-President Bill Clinton who stole the show with his rousing nomination speech Wednesday night, not only propelling him to the top of the list of political mentions on Facebook for the day, but even topping the National Football Leagues season opener, in which the Dallas Cowboys knocked off the defending Super Bowl champions and host New York Giants. According to Facebook-CNN Election Insights, the top five political terms mentioned on the social network Wednesday were: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Bill Clinton/Clinton Obama Romney Michelle Obama Elizabeth Warren

Facebook-CNN Election Insights also mentioned that Clintons percentage increase above his baseline buzz was 9,800 percent, adding that one of the keywords of his speech, arithmetic, skyrocketed by 41,210 percent during the event.

Despite the popularity of the NFL and the marquee opening-night match-up, CNN Politics reported on its Political Ticker blog that Clinton was mentioned more on Facebook Wednesday night than the terms Cowboys, Giants, football, and Romo, for Tony Romo, the Cowboys starting quarterback. Readers: Are you surprised that Clintons speech generated so much buzz? PandoDaily: WordPress Staffer Petitions Dems to Enlist Betty White as Obamas Opening Act http://pandodaily.com/2012/09/06/wordpress-staffer-petitions-dems-to-enlist-betty-white-as-obamasopening-act/ Hamish McKenzie September 6, 2012 If Betty White makes an appearance at the Democratic National Convention tonight, you can thank Peter Slutsky. The director of platform services for WordPress VIP took advantage of timing and technology to spur a counter-story to one of the defining media narratives of the Republican National Convention. Clint Eastwoods bizarre speech to an empty chair last week was characterized by many as the work of a rambling old man. Slutsky takes issue with the old part. Soon after Eastwoods speech, the New Yorker started a petition on Change.org in an effort to elevate his favorite Golden Girl into a prime-time position at the convention: introducing the President. (Conveniently, Slutskys twin brother Matthew is head of partnerships at Change.org.) At one of many booze-fuelled receptions in Charlotte yesterday, Slutsky shouted over the noise of clinking glasses and moshing suits to tell me that the petition started off as a bit of fun but has turned into something more serious. If he were a senior citizen, he would have felt alienated when the pundits talked about Eastwood being old. I would say Give me the microphone! and I would go up there and be hysterical, Slutsky said. Betty White speaks to that, because her entire career shes been old. When I was a kid she was old on The Golden Girls. Now shes like the oldest person ever to walk the Earth, but shes still funny as shit. For the first two days of the petition, hardly anyone paid attention. Slutsky started by Tweeting at Obama, and the 90-year-old White but got nothing back. Friday passed, and then Saturday. But on Sunday, the number of signatures started ticking into the thousands. Before getting on a plane to Charlotte on Monday, he put a message on his Facebook wall telling people it had gone viral, and then the thing took off. A companion Facebook group attracted tens of thousands of fans. The media started noticing. As of this morning, the petition has been covered by USA Today, the New York Daily News, CNN, and the Washington Post, among others. It has nearly 13,500 signatures. It was like this really cool moment that Im like, This is really working, said Slutsky. A little Facebook, a little Tumblr, a little Change.org, Twitter, and its all coming together and people are seeing what were doing, and it was awesome. Slutsky knows from his contacts inside Obamas campaign that news of the petition has reached the very top of the organization, but he doesnt know if White is going to have a role tonight. The actors agent told Entertainment Weekly that she probably cant attend the convention, but Slutsky is hoping she might make an appearance via video. Perhaps it could be a Google Hangout.

The Hill: Clinton Beat by NFL on TV But Won in Facebook Conversations http://thehill.com/blogs/twitter-room/other-news/248041-clinton-beat-by-nfl-on-tv-but-won-in-facebookconversationsAlicia Cohn September 6, 2012 More people watched the kick-off game of the NFL season on Wednesday than Bill Clinton's speech to the Democratic National Convention, but on Facebook the former president ruled the night. About 21 million Americans watched the National Football League's season kick-off game on NBC between the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Giants, while 7.5 million watched Clinton speak during prime-time coverage covered by ABC and CBS, according to Nielsen data reported by Reuters. But according to Facebook data reported by CNN, Bill Clinton got more mentions on the site than the terms "Cowboys," "Giants," "football" and Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo. Facebook said mentions of Clinton increased by 9,800 percent over the evening. Facebook has partnered with CNN to provide insight into what Facebook users are talking about up until the election. This week the tool has tracked a spike in Facebook chatter nationwide for President Obama and other Democratic speakers. POLITICO: Silicon Valley Stars Are a No-Show in Charlotte http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/80826.html?hp=r4 Tony Romm September 6, 2012 CHARLOTTE, N.C. President Barack Obama has raised millions from Silicon Valley, totes his iPad everywhere and touts tech on the campaign trail, but at his party's convention, many of his big-name tech backers are missing in action. Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt was in New York on Wednesday at a press conference. Top bundler Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com, is in the Bay Area prepping for a software event. And you wont see Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg or Yelp's Jeremy Stoppelman wandering around the Time Warner Arena, either. Silicon Valley at times drives the Democratic agenda the convention platform touches on everything from building out broadband to beefing up cybersecurity but it has a backseat here in Charlotte. The only Valley rep taking the forum stage during the three-day event is Steve Westly, an investor in clean energy, despite the numerous sponsorships by Web companies of parties, product demos and panel discussions. Yet it's not something that bothers many in the tech set. "What tech execs are busy doing is running companies, said Michael Petricone of the Consumer Electronics Association. "This is a political convention, and what you do at political conventions is go after specific demographics." There are a few big tech and telecom backers on hand at the DNC. David Cohen, executive vice president of Comcast, attended the convention. He and his wife have bundled more than $1 million for Obama this cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Aneesh Chopra, former White House chief technology officer, also is here. And a number of startup companies are represented including the car service, Uber.

But many other prominent Obama backers in the tech set, like Benioff, are not. Hes skipping Charlotte to be near headquarters as his company prepares for its annual Dreamforce event in San Francisco, which begins later this month. Benioff has helped cobble together more than $617,000 for the president, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. His spokesman told POLITICO he still "supports the president and his reelection efforts" and would watch the speech. Google, meanwhile, constructed a new building mostly out of colorful crates in uptown Charlotte, stocked it with a charging station and some other goodies and parked its self-driving car outside. But you won't find here any trace of Schmidt, who's donated big bucks to the Obama campaign in both 2008 and 2012. Google confirmed Schmidt has no plans at this time to join the action. Company officials are quite busy these days, as Google is reportedly talking with Apple on a truce in the smartphone patent war and Schmidt was at an event in the Big Apple on Wednesday to showcase Googles new acquisition, Motorola Mobility. Facebook's Sandberg, meanwhile, hosted a pricey, swank fundraiser for the president last year. Yet she isn't on the premises, the company confirmed this week. Facebook maintained a high profile while in Charlotte, however, building off its work in Tampa for the Republican National Convention this week. Here, it's brought its communications chief, Joe Lockhart, and in Tampa it featured top D.C. chief Joel Kaplan. Yelp's Stoppelman, a member of the campaigns Technology for Obama, is also AWOL, though his company is sponsoring a pop-up lounge in the city. The co-founder of LinkedIn also is missing: Reid Hoffman was supposed to attend and participate in a panel, but couldn't make it because of a late scheduling conflict. Hoffman is among the ranks of the president's biggest donors, and his company hosted the president at a town hall last year. The lack of a tech exec Whos Who in Charlotte to rival the gaggle of bold-face names from Hollywood doesnt suggest that Obama somehow has lost his geek advantage over GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. There weren't many tech execs making waves at the RNC in Tampa last week, either. Two of Romney's big supporters HP CEO Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina canvassed media to emphasize the candidate's strengths. But both had been active in politics, having each run for office and lost, and Whitman is a key Romney campaign adviser. And there were some notable absences there, too, like long-time GOP-backer and Cisco CEO John Chambers. Still, the absence of boardroom-level tech presence here in Charlotte creates a surprising contrast. Workers and PACs at communications and electronics companies are among some of Obama's biggest contributors this election season chipping in more than $10 million as of August, according to data crunched by the Center for Responsive Politics. And technology and the Internet also are key elements of a Democratic Party platform that emphasizes the need for future investment and innovation. But there aren't any speeches by those execs, not at a convention at which the hot-button issues relate to health care, economic recovery and gas prices. Some tech veterans, however, say the situation is instead a reflection of the Valley ethos.

"In this case, it's a cultural dynamic," said Rey Ramsey, leader of TechNet, noting the RNC faced a similar problem. "It's all about the products, less about the high-level visibility being up on the stage. That just has never been the cultural norm." CNET: Obama Facebook App Lets Users Show Theyre Watching the DNC http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57507942-93/obama-facebook-app-lets-users-show-theyre-watchingthe-dnc/ Dara Kerr September 6, 2012 Facebook is becoming part of the Democratic National Convention viewing game hours before President Obama gives his speech accepting his party's nomination for a second term in office. With the launch of the Obama 2012 Social Sharing App, which is available on the Obama-Biden Web site, viewers can share on their timelines that they're watching the speech. Users can simply click on the Facebook share button and answer some preference questions to get the app started. Information is here. The app was noted in a post on Facebook's U.S. Politics on Facebook page. The Obama campaign also recently launched the "Commit to Vote" app via Facebook, which prompts users to register to vote. Known as the social-media president, Obama is a longtime member of Facebook and has used it and other platforms -- such as Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram -- to get out his political message. He also spent time recently answering questions on Reddit. The Republican Party is also working its social-media angle and has a Facebook app called the "Social Victory Center." San Francisco Chronicle: Social Media Has Key Role in 12 Election http://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Social-media-has-key-role-in-12-election-3843166.php Julie Bykowicz September 5, 2012 Gone are the days when politicians can sleep easy if their convention speeches please television talking heads and newspaper columnists. Now, they also need Facebook likes and Twitter retweets by millions of followers. Social media prowess is on display during the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., this week and also was at the Republican gathering last week in Tampa, Fla. The dominant platforms, Bay Area social networks Twitter and Facebook, are hosting events and keeping track of who's up and who's down, socially speaking. "We're measuring in real-time conversations that used to only take place at coffee shops and water coolers," said Adam Sharp, Twitter's head of government, news and social innovation. First lady Michelle Obama's speech Tuesday night captivated Twitter, inspiring more than double the tweets per minute of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney's address Aug. 30, the company said in a blog post. The first night of the Democratic convention saw 3 million tweets, 1 million shy of the total tweets during the entire three-day Republican gathering, Twitter said in the post.

4-year difference Four years ago, the term "social media" wasn't widely used. On election day 2008, there were 1.8 million tweets. Now, that many tweets are sent every six minutes, said Rachael Horwitz, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco company. In 2008, Facebook was popular mostly among college students. This year, there are more than 110,000 political Facebook pages in the United States and 11,000 pages for politicians, said Andrew Noyes, manager of public policy and communication for the Menlo Park company. Most candidates also use blog network Tumblr, photo-sharing site Instagram and niche web venues like Pinterest to spread their messages. "This will be, without a doubt, the most socially connected election season ever," said Joe Green, president and co-founder of NationBuilder. The Los Angeles company helps campaigns organize their online presence. "Democracy in its most basic form is really about mobilization of the masses, and that is what social media enables at the grassroots level." President Obama and Romney are spending millions of dollars to advertise online, including with placed media with Facebook and Twitter. Last week, Romney's team became the first political campaign to purchase a "trending topic" on Twitter, ensuring that his message would pop up prominently in the social network's stream. Lots of helpers The presidential candidates' campaigns have digital strategists on their payrolls and also work with firms such as Targeted Victory, which helps Republicans, and its Democratic counterpart, Blue State Digital. When Obama takes the stage in Charlotte on Thursday, he will essentially have 19 million potential publicists to spread his message. That's how many Twitter followers he has, making his account the sixth-most popular in the world - behind celebrities such as Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber. Led by Obama and his 2008 technology team, Democrats have dominated social media. Yet Republicans, in some ways, are now "on equal footing," said Katie Harbath, a Facebook public policy manager and liaison to Republicans. Romney has more than 1 million Twitter followers and, like Obama, multiple Facebook pages. Last week, Romney had more than 2 million people posting about him on Facebook - at times more than Obama, Harbath said. She said Romney leveraged the convention to build his social media base, gaining more than 1 million fans during the week. Romney got more juice on Twitter during his wife's speech than his own, Sharp said. Staying connected Twitter and Facebook are going one level deeper, measuring how well the presidential candidates are connecting with their audiences in addition to how often. There's a daily Twitter Political Index, which analyzes the 400 million tweets per day to discern how users feel about Obama and Romney. The social network has partnered with two polling firms and analytics company Topsy to validate data.

A score of 25, as Obama had Wednesday, means that tweets about him are more positive than 25 percent of all other Twitter messages. Romney had a score of 14 the same day. Fifty or above is considered good, Sharp said. More telling, though, is movement from day to day, and both candidates' scores had been dropping in recent days, until Tuesday. The trend line of improving or deteriorating sentiment closely follows the movement of Gallup poll approval ratings. Through a partnership with CNN, Facebook is tracking sentiment about the candidates through the volume of Facebook activity about the election. The site, cnn.com/fbinsights, enables visitors to view trends occurring in different states, age groups and male versus female. Bloomberg Businessweek: Twitter Deputizes Masses of Political Pundits at Conventions http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-09-05/twitter-deputizes-millions-of-pundits-at-politicalconventions Julie Bykowicz September 5, 2012 Gone are the days when politicians can sleep easy if their convention speeches please television talking heads and newspaper columnists. Now, they also need Facebook likes and Twitter retweets by millions of followers. Social media prowess is on display during the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, this week and at the Republican gathering last week in Tampa, Florida. The dominant platforms, Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc., are hosting events and keeping track of whos up and whos down, socially speaking. Were measuring in real-time conversations that used to only take place at coffee shops and water coolers, said Adam Sharp, San Francisco-based Twitters head of government, news and social innovation. First Lady Michelle Obamas speech last night captivated Twitter, inspiring more than double the tweets-perminute as Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romneys address Aug. 30, the company said in a blog post. The first night of the Democratic convention saw 3 million tweets, 1 million shy of the total tweets during the entire three-day Republican gathering, Twitter said in the post. Four years ago, the term social media wasnt widely used. On Election Day in 2008, there were 1.8 million tweets; now that many tweets are sent every six minutes, said Rachael Horwitz, a Twitter spokeswoman. In 2008, Facebook was popular mostly among college students. This year, there are more than 110,000 political Facebook pages in the U.S. and 11,000 pages for politicians, said Andrew Noyes, manager of public policy and communication for Facebook. Masses Mobilized Most candidates also use blog network Tumblr, photo-sharing site Instagram and niche web venues like Pinterest to spread their messages. This will be, without a doubt, the most socially connected election season ever, said Joe Green, president and co-founder of NationBuilder. The Los Angeles-based company helps campaigns organize their online presence. Democracy in its most basic form is really about mobilization of the masses, and that is what social media enables at the grassroots level.

President Barack Obama and Romney are spending millions of dollars to advertise online, including with placed media with Menlo Park, California-based Facebook and Twitter. Last week, Romneys team became the first political campaign to purchase a trending topic on Twitter, ensuring that his message would pop up prominently in the social networks stream. Equal Footing The presidential candidates campaigns have digital strategists on their payrolls and also work with firms such as Targeted Victory, which helps Republicans, and its Democratic counterpart, Blue State Digital. When Obama takes the stage in Charlotte Sept. 6, he will essentially have 19 million potential publicists to spread his message. Thats how many Twitter followers he has, making his account the sixth most popular in the world -- behind stars such as Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber. Led by Obama and his 2008 technology team, Democrats have dominated social media. Yet Republicans, in some ways, are now on equal footing, said Katie Harbath, a Facebook public policy manager and liaison to Republicans. Romney has more than 1 million Twitter followers and, like Obama, multiple Facebook pages. Last week, Romney had more than 2 million people posting about him on Facebook -- at times more than Obama, Harbath said. She said Romney leveraged the convention to build his social media base, gaining more than 1 million fans during the week. Romney got more juice on Twitter during his wifes speech than his own, Sharp said. No one touched Clint Eastwood during the Republican convention. @InvisibleObamas Seat The surprise speaker spawned a Twitter tsunami when he addressed an empty chair as if it were Obama. The Obama campaign quickly posted a photo of the president in a chair and the message, This seats taken. As of Sept. 4, it had been retweeted more than 54,000 times -- the most activity of anyone during the Republican convention and the second most ever from Obamas account. A spoof Twitter account @InvisibleObama, featuring a picture of an empty chair, quickly popped up and now has more than 68,000 followers. Politicians are taking extra steps on social media to highlight their activities during the conventions. Political Index New Jersey Governor Chris Christie started a special Twitter handle -- @ChristieKeynote -- that attracted 7,766 followers and featured backstage photos of himself. Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin shared photos from the convention floor in Tampa with the 26,000-plus people who have liked her Facebook page. Vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan peaked during his speech with about 6,000 tweets-per-minute when he spoke about his faith and again when talked about government spending. Twitter and Facebook are going one level deeper, measuring how well the presidential candidates are connecting with their audiences in addition to how often.

Theres a daily Twitter Political Index, which analyzes the 400 million tweets per day on Twitter to discern how users feel about Obama and Romney. The social network has partnered with two polling firms and analytics company Topsy to validate data. A score of 25, as Obama had Sept. 4, means that tweets about him are more positive than 25 percent of all other Twitter messages. Romney had a score of 14 the same day. Fifty or above is considered good, Sharp said. Trend Line More telling, though is movement from day to day, and both candidates scores had been dropping in recent days, until yesterday. The trend line of improving or deteriorating sentiment closely follows the movement of Gallup poll approval ratings. Through a partnership with CNN, Facebook (FB) is tracking sentiment about the candidates through the volume of Facebook activity about the election. The site, cnn.com/fbinsights, enables visitors to view trends occurring in different states, age groups and male versus female. Just as the politicians have adapted to social media, social media is adapting to politics: Twitter and Facebook both have employees roving throughout the conventions and have sponsored parties and events to raise their profile. CNN: On Facebook, Clintons Speech More Popular Than NFL Kickoff Game http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/06/on-facebook-clintons-speech-more-popular-than-nflkickoff-game/ Eric Weisbrod September 6, 2012 (CNN) President Clinton took the ball and ran with it last night, and Facebook has the numbers to prove it. Even though the Dallas Cowboys beat the New York Giants in last night's NFL season opener, it was the former president who garnered the most attention on Facebook. According to data provided to CNN from Facebook, Bill Clinton got more mentions on the site than the terms "Cowboys," "Giants," "football," and "Romo," the Cowboy's starting quarterback. Normally, the vice-presidential running-mate speaks the night before the presidential candidate accepts the party's nomination, but because of concerns that Vice President Joe Biden's speech would be overshadowed by the game, convention organizers scheduled his address for Thursday night for maximum exposure. Facebook's numbers show that the worrying was for naught, because Clinton's speech proved to be an effective attention getter on Facebook. Clinton's 48-minute address received the highest level of political buzz across both conventions with only one night to go. Compared to the previous hours, mentions of Clinton increased by 9,800%. Clinton's use of the word "arithmetic" to explain how he delivered four surplus budgets as President also gained buzz, jumping 41,210% on Facebook.

Barack Obama was the second most talked about political figure last night, followed by Mitt Romney, Michelle Obama and Elizabeth Warren, according to the data. All Facebook: Facebook Highlights Democratic App Developers at DNC http://allfacebook.com/apps-and-drinks-dnc_b98831 Jennifer Moire September 5, 2012 Facebook application developers were in the spotlight for the second week in a row at the social networks Apps and Drinks event held in Charlotte, N.C., Tuesday to coincide with the kickoff of the Democratic National Convention. A similar event was held last week at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla. This time, app developers aligned with Democrats were featured in a contemporary art gallery. For campaigns, advocacy organizations, and any group using grassroots to advance ideas or legislative agendas, Facebook is rapidly evolving into a necessary resource. As one company representative noted, Facebook is becoming akin to a virtual volunteer. Campaigns are leveraging Facebook to accomplish basic campaign tasks from phone banking to door knocking and direct mailings. And rich voter data are overlayed on the Facebook platform tapping into the most powerful connection of all, friends connecting with friends. The event highlighted the following Democratic apps:

NGP VAN: The integration tool behind last years We Are Ohio campaign recently launched Social Organizing, which enables people to match their Facebook friends to voter files, powering voter ID, grassroots fundraising, volunteer recruitment, and get-out-the-vote efforts. The firm says that 30,000 actions have been completed through the tool. Two-thirds of these were part of last years effort to overturn an anti-union law. As Tobias Quaranto, a sales director with NGP VAN, told AllFacebook, the tool is now faster and more fierce than before. Among the features he highlighted for us was the enhanced friend mapping feature, which is ideal for campaigns and advocacy groups, as well as a stronger gamification component that allows users to post badges publicly to their Facebook walls when they make calls or send emails to their friends. Obama for America: The Obama Facebook app helps people share stories, videos, voter registration info, and other campaign activities with friends, while also helping President Barack Obamas campaign reach a much broader audience not already on its site. Our Time: Our Time is a site dedicated to youth empowerment through the voting process. Their voter registration app can be added to any Facebook page and allows people to connect via Facebook to register to vote and share with their friends. AFL-CIOs Workers Voice: Political action committee Workers Voicee recently introduced the Friends & Neighbors app, which empowers activists to carry AFL-CIOs message to friends by matching their Facebook connections to AFL-CIOs targeted voters on the voter file.

Some of the other apps included were Votizen, WeForPresident, NationBuilder, and the Facebook-CNN I Voted app. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) was seen at the event (pictured below), along with Facebook representatives with roots in Democratic politics, including Joe Lockhart and Sarah Feinberg, a former special assistant to Obama.

Readers: Have you used any of the apps Facebook featured in Tampa or Charlotte? Charlotte Magazine: Inside Facebook and Google at the DNC http://www.charlottemagazine.com/Blogs/The-DNC-In-The-CLT/September-2012/Inside-Facebook-andGoogle-at-the-DNC/ Jarvis Holliday September 5, 2012 According to web information company Alexa, Facebook and Google are currently the number one and two most-visited websites in the world. I attended events yesterday the web giants are hosting while the Democratic National Convention is underway in Charlotte, coincidentally going to a Facebook event first and a Google event second. Facebook hosted its Apps and Drinks private event at Elder Gallery in South End, with Facebook staff, members of the technology developer community, and special guests. Meanwhile, Google has set up shop on Tryon Street in Uptown in a massive tent that looks like it should be a permanent structure. Aside from the Google Lounge, where guests relax on futuristic-looking, Google-logo-colors-inspired furniture and plug in their gadgets, there was also a reception honoring African-American and Latino-American leadership. Below are a few photos from inside the two events, along with a quick video of an impromptu musical performance. PandoDaily: Pull Up a Chair and Enjoy the Twitter Election http://pandodaily.com/2012/09/05/pull-up-a-chair-and-enjoy-the-twitter-election/ Hamish McKenzie September 5, 2012 This is the Twitter election. Michelle Obamas Democratic National Convention speech last night peaked at 28,003 tweets a minute. Thats twice as many as Mitt Romney got at his Twitter peak during his speech last week. As of about midnight, there were 3 million tweets related to MObamas prime-time performance. Soon after she stepped off the podium, whoever was manning Barack Obamas Twitter account tweeted a photo of him on his couch with his two daughters, watching the speech on TV, pride etched deeply into his silent expression. Comedian Kal Penn tweeted his #sexyface and started a trend that generated 2,000 tweets per minute. In 2008, the number of tweets over the course of the two conventions combined totaled 360,000. On the night of Mitt Romneys speech alone, there were 4 million tweets related to the occasion, even as TV ratings fell dramatically compared to four years ago. The numbers are impressive, but theyre not what counts. What matters more is that Twitter amplifies feeling. In political theater, which is exactly what the conventions are, feeling is what counts. Last night I posted a sample of my Twitter timeline as Michelle Obamas speech played out. Even Republicans would have to concede that it was a masterful display, exuding confidence, hope, and excitement while subtly undercutting everything Romney said the week before. (As I suggested in another post yesterday, the

publics online reaction seems to focus on emotion rather than facts.) But while the television coverage captured her delivery in high-definition, Twitter crystallized it in gleaming little nuggets, adding glaze to the lines that jumped out at the viewers: We learned about honesty and integrity. That the truth matters. That you dont take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules. And success doesnt count unless you earn it fair and square. I have seen firsthand that being President does not change who you are it reveals who you are. He believes that when you work hard and do well and walk through that doorway of opportunity, you do not slam it shut behind you. You reach back, and you give other folks the same chances that helped you succeed. Campaign politics so often hinge on moments and moments are what Twitter specializes in. Twitter doesnt only capture moments, it puts them on a pedestal, it gives them biggest megaphone that has ever existed, and it attaches them to our friends, our peers, and the voices we respect enough to follow. TV is still a powerful mode of content delivery, but the chatter on Twitter makes the pundits obsolete before they can even get to their microphones. And even the major stations rely on Twitter to enhance their coverage and push their message. Facebook has made strong claims to its relevance during this campaign, but it doesnt drive or capture the emotion-of-moment like Twitter can. Facebook is a place where we hang out with friends and family. Talking about politics there just makes the whole conversation awkward. Google has talked a lot about the importance of YouTube, which has been livestreaming both conventions. It certainly plays a large role, but its more of a broadcast medium than a zone of interaction. No matter how hard Google tries to sell it, YouTube comments arent going to win any hearts and minds. Twitter, on the other hand, is for interests. The people you follow are the people you would be happy to debate in the lunch hall. You can track hashtags for particular topics and events. You can scroll quickly past a tweet that isnt providing nutrition. You can skip right to relevance and slake your thirst for instant context and community. On Twitter, you are part of the conversation, part of the political process, creator and consumer of your own campaign narrative. Even though not every voter is on Twitter it has only 140 million users worldwide the influencers are. And yes, that was also true of the 2008 election. But not on this scale, not with this emotional force, and not, by any means, to the extent where you could sensibly claim that 140 characters can swing an election. On the evidence weve seen in this campaign so far, that last statement still seems extreme. But it is not farfetched. Romneys moment in the spotlight last week was overshadowed not so much by an old man on stage gibbering to an empty chair, but by a barrage of tweets that buried the former Governor under their enormous collective weight. Twitter drove the discussion that night and predicted the headlines of the next minutes news. Twitter was as much part of the story as it was the story itself. And if an election can turn on a bead of sweat, it can at least pirouette on a perfectly placed post. National Journal: Obama App Links Facebook Friends to Voter Lists http://www.nationaljournal.com/daily/obama-app-links-facebook-friends-to-voter-lists-20120905

Adam Mazmanian September 5, 2012 The Obama campaign is looking to increase voter registration and stimulate turnout with an app that lets Facebook users match their social-network contacts with voter files. A link to the app was distributed on Tuesday night by the official Barack Obama Twitter account. Democratic activists can also access a service called Social Organizingfrom left-leaning elections-technology firm NGP VANto find out which of their Facebook friends are registered by tapping into an extensive voter database that includes basic personal information, turnout history, and responses to survey questions. Much of this voter information is already publicly available. Shane Hamlin, codirector of elections in Washington state, points out that a CD-ROM of the states database of 3.7 million voters is available to anyone who asks and pays $7. What is different in this election cycle is the volume and depth of information that has now become accessible to campaign volunteers at the touch of a button. The technology has the potential to turn ordinary activists into virtual precinct captains, but there is no guarantee that the data will be used for its intended purpose. The matching of voter lists to social networks widely crosses the line, said Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. She thinks that voter information should be shareable across social-network lists only on an opt-in basis to protect the privacy of unregistered voters. Someone could be a nonvoter for religious reasons or because of a felony conviction they dont care to disclose to Facebook friends, Coney said. Being able to monitor whether they do register or not can raise questions they dont really want to get into trying to answer, she said. The matching of social-network lists to voter registrations doesnt actually occur within Facebooks system. Volunteers working with the NGP VAN list use their Facebook login to access the Social Organizing interface, said Stuart Trevelyan, head of NGP VAN. His app was highlighted at a Facebook event in Charlotte on Tuesday. Were confident that we abide by Facebooks terms of service and also abide by privacy rules, Trevelyan said. The Social Organizing tool allows users to essentially reconstitute their personal networks within the confines of the NGP VAN site and organize them based on their location, registration status, stated political preference, and other factors, in order to contact friends on behalf of Democratic candidates. Theres nothing special about having facilitated that with Facebook data that makes it some sort of privacy invasion, Trevelyan said. The Obama app functions as a frame within a Facebook page, but the privacy policy indicates that the information flows directly into the campaign site, without going through Facebook. Washington state has an online voter-registration app that works much the same way: It loads within a Facebook frame, but users input their information into an online form provided by the states Elections Division, Hamlin said. Coney is still concerned that the data from these apps could be abused. When you start putting enough information online about the lives of people in communities, you do start creating some problems, she said. Whats going on with modern campaigns is lots of data-mining, lots of data-matching, lots of profiling thats

taking place. If a person is asked repeatedly to register to vote and they dont register to vote, theyre going to be categorized in a way that may not be great for them in the long run. CNN: Conventions Live Blog http://politicslive.cnn.com/Event/2012_Conventions_live_blog?Page=0 Eric Weisbrod September 5, 2012 Vice President Joe Biden (the teal line) is finally getting some buzz on Facebook. Mentions of Biden are up 354% compared to last night at 10pm ET Which convention-related moments were mentioned the most on Facebook? 1. Michelle Obama speech 2. Mitt Romney speech 3. Ann Romney speech 4. Paul Ryan speech 5. Julian Castro speech 6. Chris Christie speech 7. Clint Eastwood speech Facebook mentions of Barack Obama increased 745% during Michelle Obama's speech compared to the previous hours. Michelle Obama speech was the most mentioned convention-related event so far on Facebook. More people mentioned Barack Obama during this speech than people mentioned Romney during his own speech. We will keep you posted! After Clinton's speech, check the Facebook CNN Election Insights tool to see if Obama gets a bump from the speech. Data is updated every hour on the hour. Mitt Romney's speech is the second most mentioned convention event on Facebook after Michelle Obama's speech. Romney mentions increased by 422% during his speech compared to the previous hours. The third most discussed convention event on Facebook was Clint Eastwood's speech. Mentions of Eastwood increased by a whopping 8,900% during his speech. Clint Eastwood's speech was talked about more on Facebook than Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan's speech, which comes in fourth. There was a 2,280% increase in Paul Ryan mentions compared to previous hours. Fifth most buzzed about convention speech on Facebook was Ann Romney's. Followed by the speeches of San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. In the last 12 hours, Barack Obama dominated the political conversation on Facebook in every state except Utah and Wyoming. Compare this to the last 7 days, when Romney had the majority of the chatter in most states. Mentions of President Obama on Facebook are up 244% from this time yesterday. There was a huge spike in Obama chatter last night after Michelle Obama's speech. All this data can be found at www.cnn.com/facebookinsights Guardian: Obama Campaign Manager Jim Messina Puts Faith in Online Organising http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/04/obama-jim-messina-online-organising?newsfeed=true Ed Pilkington September 4, 2012 The Obama campaign's use of sophisticated digital tools designed to oil its ground operation and increase engagement with voters on the doorstep could give the president a one or two point advantage over Mitt

Romney in the key battleground states upon which the outcome of the election depends, his campaign manager has predicted. Jim Messina, who heads an army of several hundred staffers that has been working for 18 months to secure Obama's re-election, said that the digital campaign that has been assembled this year to interact with voters is "light years ahead of where we were in 2008. We're going to make 2008 on the ground look like Jurassic Park". He also claimed that Democrat's investment in innovations such as the canvassing tool set Dashboard and a massive database of voters' details that interfaces with Facebook had left the Republicans standing. "The Romney campaign are doing more than the McCain campaign did [in 2008], I want to give them credit for that. But they are nowhere near where we are on the ground," Messina told an event at the Democratic National Convention sponsored by ABC News and Yahoo News. He gave examples from two important swing states North Carolina where the convention is being held and where the Obama campaign has 50 field offices up and running while the Romney campaign has yet to open its 20th; and Ohio where the disparity on the ground is even greater at 100 Obama offices to Romney's 30. Messina said that a two-point bounce in key swing states such as Florida, Ohio, Iowa and Colorado could be decisive in determining the outcome of the 6 November election. "This election is going to be very close. We have been building a ground operation that will give us the one or two points that we need to win these states and we are on track to do that." Messina's comments on the 2012 election's ground war were unusually direct for the Obama campaign. The Chicago headquarters that is spearheading the effort to re-elect the president normally avoids discussion of its technical operations for fear of giving away trade secrets to the opposition. The Chicago team prides itself with having developed over the past five years, since Obama launched his first bid for the White House in 2007, the most sophisticated digital campaign in global political history. It is centred around a gargantuan unified database of millions of voter files which, through Dashboard, volunteers can access anywhere at any time. That, combined with Facebook and online micro-targetting of specific groups of undecided voters, has allowed the campaign to amplify and extend the traditional door-todoor efforts of volunteers digitally. While Obama has put a large portion of his war chest behind the largest and best oiled ground operation ever seen, Romney and his Super PAC supporters have taken a more conventional approach of blitzing battleground states with largely negative television advertising. The outcome of the presidential race could in part hinge on this fundamental difference a modern digital campaign versus a conventional TV one. Ben LaBolt, the Obama campaign's chief spokesman, said that the president had an important advantage over his Republican challenger. Obama took the unprecedented decision at the end of the 2008 race to leave his digital campaign largely intact, redirecting it to help fight battles faced by his administration such as the passage of healthcare reform. That means that he was able to start campaigning for re-election historically early. "We have been organising in this campaign for 500 days; while the Republicans were out there pummelling each other during the primaries, our supporters were talking to their friends and neighbours about the president's record and vision," LaBolt said.

While the 2012 digital campaign launched by the Obama team undoubtedly looks slick, many of the claims made for it have so far been unsubstantiated by any solid data. Messina claimed that the campaign has registered 150% more voters and knocked on 147% more doors this year than at this stage in 2008, though whether or not that translates into actual votes cast remains one of the big questions of this presidential election cycle. PandoDaily: Yep, Were at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, NC http://pandodaily.com/2012/09/03/yep-were-at-the-democratic-national-convention-in-charlotte-nc/ Hamish McKenzie September 3, 2012 Ive just arrived in Charlotte for the Democratic National Convention. Ill be here throughout the week reporting on tech stories related to the convention, the election campaign, and anyone who talks to an empty chair on stage. By necessity, Ill be doing this a bit gonzo style (trade the napkins for an iPhone and a Macbook, but keep the booze), chiefly because I dont have media credentials for the actual thing in the stadium where suits spend all day waving signs, cheering, and chanting at each other for scripted paeans to their own political pomposity. As all 24 minutes of my convention-covering experience tells me, these things arent really so much about what you see on television, anyway. Well, of course thats what matters most for the politicians and the parties, who rely on the big stage and TV spotlight for an important chance to tell the public that the opposition candidate is not fit for office, tighty whities, or a job at Applebees. But for everyone else, the real action happens outside the stadium, at events and parties around town, where the politically inclined get to celebrate, for once, being the cool kids on campus. That, as you can guess, means flesh pressing, ethanol imbibing, and discussing issues with furrowed brows. Therell even be panels. In other words, the Democratic National Convention is South By Southwest for khakis. So, why am I here when I wasnt at last weeks Republican convention? Two reasons: mildly wilder parties, and Tampa. I live in Baltimore. From there, Charlotte is doable. But Florida? Well, I just got back from China and I was in no mood to haul ass to the Sunshine State to breakdance with Newt Gingrich. This time. My preference for the DNC, in other words, is not political. And actually, coming here was a last-minute decision. I know you like to think that PandoDailys political coverage is super coordinated, but were a startup and were trying to cover a hundred things at once. It was only as the convention got ever closer that I realized how big a role tech would be playing here. Many of the major tech and social media companies have a strong presence in Charlotte this week, including Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, and Tumblr. Theyll be throwing parties and engaging in outreach efforts, including teaching politicos how to instal MS-DOS. Startups will also play a big part. Tonight, Ill be checking out The Roots and the punctuationally challenged will.i.am at a show put on by HyperVocal, Fighter Interactive, and EventFarm, in conjunction with Startup America. The party kicks off a week of events called StartUp RockOn, which includes a panel series that will focus on topics such as governments and startups, innovation in journalism, and innovation in gaming. (Ive heard the Dems want to bring back joysticks.)

Outside of the organized events, it has already become obvious just how central a role social media and mobile apps will have throughout the convention. The my2012charlotte iPhone app will be my guide to all events, news, and city information this week. Funnily enough, all its restaurants and nightlife information is provided by Yelp, but with a Democratic-oriented interface (ie, its blue). To me that suggests one thing: the app-makers assume that most politicians dont know what Yelp is. It also comes with a pre-hashtagged Twitter stream (#dnc2012). I, like many others, have also signed up for daily emails from DemList, and Im following its Twitter and Facebook accounts. Most of the TV stations, as well as others such as Politico, will be live-streaming coverage of the convention and related commentary, just as they were at the RNC. And CNN and Time have colaunched an app, Convention Floor Pass, that features breaking news, alerts, and daily analysis. It is, as you can tell, all very digital-y. In fact, this must be the most digital-y convention ever, shattering last weeks record set by the Republicans. (Im making this assumption on the basis that the Dems have more young tikes who understand the Twitters.) We saw at the RNC just how big a deal social media was in amplifying and fact-checking the messages of Romney, Ryan, Eastwood, and company. This week well find out if the Dems can turn the Internet to their advantage. A good way to start? Well, how about getting Betty White to introduce the President? CBS News: How to Follow the 2012 Republican Convention on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-57500864-501465/how-to-follow-the-2012-republicannational-convention-on-facebook-twitter-google-/ Chenda Ngak September 3, 2012 The RNC is creating several opportunities for supporters to engage on social networks. An official Facebook app called "Convention Without Walls" lets users tell their stories by submitting photos and videos, which can be submitted via YouTube. A Tampa 2012 mobile app has been launched for iPhones and Android devices. The app lets users view the convention schedule (with events now delayed until Tuesday after Tropical Storm Isaac's threat), explore Tampa, and keep up with tweets from prominent Republicans. For the first time ever, the RNC will live stream the entire convention on its YouTube channel. In April, the RNC named Google and YouTube as the "Official Social Platform and Live Stream Provider." "Google and YouTube are transforming the political process, providing voters an unprecedented degree of participation and, for the very first time, giving every American who has access to a computer, tablet, video gaming system, interactive television, or video-enabled smart-phone an exclusive backstage pass to the podium of a national political convention," said convention CEO William Harris in a press release. Social media has grown immensely since the 2008 elections. Aside from the obvious Facebook, Twitter and YouTube profiles, the RNC also has official Instagram, Google+, Pinterest and Foursquare accounts - services that weren't around during the last election cycle. Instagram users can view convention photos using the "Convention Without Walls" Facebook app or by searching GOPconvention on the mobile app. Supporters can follow Republican presumptive nominee Mitt Romney and his choice for vice president, Paul Ryan, on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Additionally, Spotify users can subscribe to the Romney Ryan 2012 campaign's playlists, as well.

Social media companies are working hard to cater to politicians, supporters and the media. Twitter has set up a political index that profiles the candidates' number of followers, tweets and changes in daily activity. Facebook has an official hub for U.S. politics that highlights politicians and political campaigns. CBS News will join The National Journal and The Atlantic for daily briefings at both conventions. Briefings start on Aug. 27 at 9:30 a.m. ET and will be streamed live at CBSNews.com. Here's the full list of social media links for the 2012 Republican National Convention and Romney Ryan 2012 campaign. Republican National Convention social media profiles Official website: GOPConvention2012.com Official Facebook page Official Google+ page Official YouTube page Official Pinterest page Republican National Convention on Foursquare GOPconvention on Instagram via Facebook @GOPconvention on Twitter Convention hashtag: #GOP2012 Republican National Convention mobile apps Tampa 2012 iOS app on iTunes Tampa 2012 Android app at Google Play Romney Ryan 2012 social media profiles Romney Ryan 2012 official website: MittRomney.com Mitt Romney on Facebook Mitt Romney on Twitter Mitt Romney on Google+ Mitt Romney on Tumblr

Mitt Romney on Spotify

Mitt Romney on Pinterest Mitt Romney on YouTube

Paul Ryan on Facebook Paul Ryan on Twitter 2012 politics hubs on social media sites U.S. Politics on Facebook The Twitter Political Index Google coverage of the 2012 RNC Tech Crunch: Do Women Love Ann Romney? Only Facebook Knows http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/02/do-women-love-ann-romney-only-facebook-knows/ Gregory Feinstein September 2, 2012 For all the millions spent on the Republican National Convention, the entire operation could only speculate whether their keynote speeches had any meaningful impact. Until Facebook achieved near universal adoption among the voting class, brands had no reliable way to gage public opinion. Large surveys are subject to respondents notoriously bad memories, focus groups are too tiny to be nationally representative, and the Twitterverse is too liberal and young. However, Facebooks recent experiment with topical chatter during the RNC may have just revealed the social network as the best known barometer of national buzz. During Ann Romneys speech, the entire map of women talking from coast to coast turned bright red, recalls CNN producer Michelle Jaconi, who oversaw a Facebook partnership that visualizes political social chatter across a map of the US. While Facebook doesnt measure the sentiment of opinion, a giant spike in female chatter is the best indication weve ever had that team Romney hit the bullseye. Itd be nearly impossible to ascertain how women actually felt about Ann Romneys speech using traditional methods. Hindsight surveys asking respondents how they felt about a speech over the phone are subject to participants notoriously bad memories. As weve noted before, many people cant remember what they ate for breakfast, or remember monumental life events; so, they certainly wouldnt be better at reflecting how they felt during a speech days earlier. The second-best alternative is a real-time focus group, which measures opinion while groups of potential voters watch a replay of the speech. Unfortunately, focus groups are rife with problems: bored participants rush to judgement, are heavily influenced by the latent actions of the research director and their surrounding peers, and, are by nature, too tiny to be representative of the national population.

Twitter attempted to reveal national sentiment with its political index, which measures the volume of positive and negative tweets related to each presidential hopeful. But, research has shown that the modern state of statistical science just doesnt know how to accurately measure opinion through the (heavily biased) Twitterverse. It can be concluded that the predictive power of Twitter regarding elections has been greatly exaggerated, writes computer science professor, Daniel Gayo-Avello. Facebook though, has achieved near universal adoption in the United States. According to Pew, 70% of the Republicans sweet-spot 35-49 demographic use social networks (and nearly all of them use Facebook). Even if the Facebook chatter wasnt all positive, the campaign now knows that it teed up enough users in the chosen demographic to mobilize passionate supporters. You know who the power mobile users of Facebook are? Ronmeys Digital Director, Zac Moffatt asks, stay-at-home moms. With Facebook, Moffatt can target them with specific calls to action. And, the Romney campaign has a history of channeling female engagement at the perfect time. Earlier in the year, when Obama campaign advisor Hilary Rosen made the unfortunate claim that Ann Romney never worked a day in her life, Moffatt had Ann Romney respond on Twitter and Facebook. In 5 days, Moffett recalls, Ann Romney had 85K people engaging with her online. In 48 hours, we created the single largest coalition, on the conservative side of the country, from scratch, on the only platform which could achieve this, which is Facebook. CNNs experiment with Facebook was a proving ground for the social network as a goldmine in demographicspecific buzz. After the election, the benefits are sure to spill over into industry marketing. Ford, for instance, would certainly want to know if a Superbowl ad lit up teenage chatteras would any national brand. Where the volume of chatter matters more than sentiment, its hard to imagine a better data source than Facebook. So, brands, put your ear to Facebooks grindstone. Fox: Romney campaign claims to be closing gap in social media battle http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/09/01/romney-campaign-claims-to-be-closing-gap-in-social-mediabattle/ Cristina Corbin September 2, 2012 Its an all-out battle for votes in the last two months before the election and its happening across Twitter feeds, on the walls of Facebook and in Google chat rooms everywhere. And on that social-media front, Mitt Romneys campaign claims its catching up. While President Obama and his supporters prepare for what Democrats are calling the most open and accessible convention in history, Romneys team boasted Saturday that it is closing the digital gap between the campaigns and accused its rival of running a social media operation thats just too well, hyperactive. The Democrats have long been the leaders in using social media to their advantage. According to a Pew Research Center study released Aug. 15, the 2012 presidential election is no different with Obama far exceeding Romney in the number of Facebook followers and daily campaign tweets. But more doesnt mean better, according to Romneys digital director, Zac Moffatt, who oversees all social media and online advertising for the campaign.

The Pew is not an authority on how to use campaign social media, Moffatt told FoxNews.com, noting that the results of the study were released three months ago, well before Romney announced his running mate and Republicans converged on Tampa for their partys convention. They think that because you tweet more, you must be better at Twitter, he said. Barack Obama tweets 30 times a day thats not how we want to use Twitter. We wouldnt want to do it 30 times a day because if everythings a priority, nothings a priority, he said. The Romney team says it has made strides in engaging users across various online platforms particularly on Facebook. Moffatt claims, for example, that the average re-tweet for us is much higher than the Obama campaign per tweet. Moffatt said that of the 5.8 million Romney followers currently on Facebook, about 2.4 million are using the online social network to post about the candidate and his campaign. A report by Inside Facebook, an independent news service of Inside Network, says that the average number of interactions per day on Obamas Facebook page is not much higher than on Romneys. The Pew research study, however, finds that the Obama campaign is still active on nearly twice as many digital tools and that the online content it produces generates more responses from users on average. Obama has 28 million Likes on Facebook versus Romneys 5 million. On Twitter, Obama and his campaign have tweeted 5,685 times and enjoy 19,169,596 followers. Romney, in contrast, has tweeted 1,109 times and has 996,729 followers. The Obama campaign recently showed how it uses social media to its advantage when it responded via Twitter to Clint Eastwoods impromptu act before the Republican convention Thursday, during which the legendary actor addressed an empty chair meant to be an imaginary Obama. This seats taken, the Obama campaign tweeted a day later and included a photo of the commander-inchief from behind, sitting in a chair at what appears to be a cabinet meeting. Despite the Obama campaigns social media success, Moffatt says the Romney team continues to enjoy a spike in followers across the Twitterverse and pointed to Ann Romney as an early example of that success. The day after Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen said on television that Romneys wife never worked a day in her life, Ann Romney set up a Twitter account and fired back. "I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys," Romney tweeted. "Believe me, it was hard work." Almost instantly, Moffatt said, Mrs. Romney attracted tens of thousands of followers to her Twitter account, which describes her as Mom of five boys. Grandmother of 18. Out campaigning for @mittromney. The Obama campaign has an advantage in that theyve been doing this for six years and have invested a lot of money in it, but I think every single day were catching up, and in some ways weve overtaken them, Moffatt said. CNN: RNC Nets Higher Buzz Factor Than Hurricane Isaac, Facebook Talk Meter Shows http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/01/rnc-nets-higher-buzz-factor-than-hurricane-isaac-facebooktalk-meter-shows/ CNN Political Unit September 1, 2012

(CNN) - While Republicans gathered in Tampa to nominate Mitt Romney as their presidential candidate, and Hurricane Isaac approached the Gulf Coast, more users of Facebook were talking about the Republican National Convention than the storm, according to data compiled by the Facebook "Talk Meter." RNC social sharing was more significant in Washington, D.C., than in any other state, although Florida, which hosted the convention, placed second in a list of buzz by geography. The data provided by Facebook did not specify the timeframe for this buzz, but the Republican convention opened on Monday and concluded with Romney's acceptance speech on Thursday evening. While the data compiled by Facebook, shared through a partnership with CNN, is not a scientific survey, it is an attempt to gauge how users of the website, and the larger population, perceive the state of political play. A demographic breakdown of the data provided by the social sharing website found that men over the age of 65 were talking about Clint Eastwood's surprise appearance at the RNC more than any other group. Next came men between 55 and 64, followed by women over the age of 65. The data did not, however, indicate what the Facebook users thought of his controversial remarks, nor did it measure what demographic groups were watching coverage of the convention in greater numbers than other groups. The "Talk Meter" calculates a jump in buzz, so Eastwood being outside of the spotlight prior to his remarks helped him jump up the "Talk Meter" scale. Both Romney and his wife, Ann, were also discussed most by those older groups. More men and women over the age of 65 discussed Mitt Romney in the recent sampling than any other group, and Ann Romney received buzz among men and women over 55 years-of-age. Geographically, the state with the largest number of people discussing their performances was Utah. That state has a high percentage of people who share Romney's Mormon faith. The data showed that men between 35 and 54 talked about Romney's running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, more than any other demographic. He was buzzed about the most in Washington, D.C., and Wisconsin, his home state. Romney's campaign may find encouragement in the geographic areas which the RNC received the greatest rate of buzz. Besides battleground Florida, the toss-up states of Colorado, North Carolina, and Nevada also placed in the top ten, according to this scale. The Facebook "Talk Meter" also assigns a numerical value to an event's magnitude. The RNC ranked at approximately a 6.12, Facebook said - which placed it above Hurricane Isaac (at a 5.5) and the announcement of Ryan as Romney's running mate (5.21). But it was no Super Bowl (8.62 in 2012) nor Supreme Court health care decision (6.97 earlier this year), nor did it compete with the inauguration of President Barack Obama (8.99) in 2008. BuzzFeed: Obama Responds to Eastwood: This Seats Taken http://www.buzzfeed.com/chrisgeidner/obama-responds-to-eastwood-this-seats-taken Chris Geidner August 31, 2012 The Facebook post follows Clint Eastwood's imagined conversation with Obama that took place as the movie star spoke to an empty chair in Tampa.

Newsday: Barack Obamas Facebook Photo Responds to Clint Eastwoods Empty Chair http://www.newsday.com/opinion/viewsday-1.3683911/barack-obama-s-facebook-photo-responds-to-clinteastwood-s-empty-chair-1.3941834 Bob Keeler August 31, 2012 Twitter lit up last night after Clint Eastwood's deeply weird monologue with an empty chair on the primetime stage of the Republican National Convention. Today, the White House weighed in with this Facebook post. Looks like the president can take a joke -- or at least go with the flow. In the middle of all the one-liners, the photo is a stark reminder to Mitt Romney and the rest of us of the power of an incumbent president to set the agenda. The seat President Barack Obama occupies is the center of political action for the whole nation. But it's helpful to remember that this seat, currently occupied by a president well known since childhood for his preternatural cool, can also become a hot seat in a matter of minutes. World events don't follow our political calendar. In the two months between now and Election Day, a sudden geopolitical surprise, or a nasty weather event that tests the federal government's ability to respond, can make any president squirm in his seat. Those surprises can break a president, or they can give him a chance to be cool, commanding and presidential. So keep your eye on that chair. Huffington Post: Can Facebook Call the Election? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amir-aczel/facebook-pollingelection_b_1841296.html?utm_hp_ref=technology&ir=Technology Amir Aczel August 31, 2012 Exactly 20 years -- and five presidential election seasons -- ago, at the end of August 1992, I was flying from London back to Boston, and at 41,000 feet had one of the most interesting ideas in my professional life. I was then a professor of mathematics and statistics at what is today called Bentley University (then Bentley College) and about to start teaching an advanced statistics course. What would happen, I asked myself, if instead of giving my class the usual boring examples, I would have them do a class project: use statistics to predict the results of the upcoming presidential election? Professional polling organizations like Gallup have thousands of employees and bottomless pockets, but the hubris of youth told me that I knew statistics better than they did, and that with 25 students, 12 phone lines, and a budget (generously provided by the college) to make a mere 1,000 phone calls to voters around the country, I could call the election with high accuracy. We spent the semester learning about sampling methods, stratification, bias in surveys, and sampling distributions, all in preparation for our big event. Then, the night before the election, we stayed up late in our "operations center," each group of students manning a phone, armed with a state-of-the-art random sampling scheme we had developed throughout the course that would give every voter in the United States an equal chance of being selected for our representative sample. Over takeout pizza and countless cups of coffee, we ran a poll of 1,000 voters that perfectly spanned the entire United States, with all its regions, area codes, and phone exchanges proportionally represented in

our sample. And we did it! We were able to call the results of the election to within half a percentage point for one of the three candidates who ran that year, Ross Perot, and within 1% and 1.5%, respectively, for the other two: Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. A good experimental design allowed us to do so well -- obtain a result of higher overall accuracy than that of Gallup -- and our predictions were reported in some newspapers and on radio programs. The point is that, by 1992, telephones had become a viable way of conducting political polls. But it hasn't always been that way. Before 1936, an important magazine that no longer exists, the Literary Digest, had been able to call presidential elections so well that the New York Times would regularly report the Digest poll results on its front page during every election campaign. In 1936, Digest editors decided to outdo themselves, hoping to gain even more prestige for their magazine. They would collect a sample of unprecedented size: 10 million voters! (Of these, 2.4 million responded -- still a sample that is immensely large.) The hugeness of the sample, the researchers believed, would guarantee them a supreme accuracy. Unfortunately, they did not fully understand the concepts of randomness and bias. The Literary Digest was a conservative publication, and its readers tended to vote Republican. The Digest used its readership as one source of sampled voters, thus introducing a bias. But two more sources of bias existed -- and they are more interesting for us here -- one was automobile registration plates, and the other was telephone numbers! Now, today we poll people using the phone all the time. But this was 76 years ago: People who had cars and/or phones tended to be wealthier, and wealthy people, as we know, tend to vote Republican. So the frame, the statistical base for the sampling, was highly flawed -- it had a built-in bias to the right -- and so even a fantastically large sample size of 2.4 million could not make that natural bias go away. (There is also the problem of non-response, the fact that of 10 million people, less than a quarter responded; but that is another issue. Incidentally, my students told the people they polled that their grade in the class depended on their answering the poll, so our non-response was close to zero!). Because their vaunted sample indicated that the Republican candidate, Kansas Governor Alfred Landon, would win the election, the magazine went boldly out with this prediction -- prominently reported on the front-page of the New York Times and other newspapers. History decided otherwise, and the Democratic candidate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, won the election in a landslide. The Literary Digest soon closed its offices in disgrace, having lost both face and readership. So why am I telling you this story? In 1936, using telephone numbers to generate a frame from which to collect a random sample was a prescription for disaster. By 1992, phones had become the most efficient way to generate good samples because they were easy to use (who wants to travel from town to town, knocking on doors?) and in the meantime phones had become ubiquitous and no longer exhibited a preference to be owned by richer people: so the built-in bias was almost completely gone. (I have to say "almost" because there are people with no phones, but they are very few and their phonelessness may not be as highly income-dependent as it would have been in 1936). Another interesting fact to note here is that sample sizes need not be very large. A well-designed survey, in which good probability sampling is carried out, may well contain as little as 1,000 voters and still give excellent information. (The statistical rule is that in a random sample of size n, the sampling error at 95% probability is roughly plus or minus one divided by the square root of n. Thus, for a sample of size 1,000, the sampling error at 95% probability is plus or minus about three percentage points.*) We have now moved to the next level of technology -- from phones to the Internet. And the question is: Have we progressed to the point at which using the Internet as a source of statistical information valid or not? And this is what brings me to Facebook. Both President Obama and Mitt Romney have their own

Facebook pages, on which Facebook users can click the "like" button. I tracked the "likes" for Obama and Romney over three days, and here is what I found: Barack Obama: 28,004,524 likes on August 28, 2012 A day later, after the GOP convention nominated Mitt Romney: 28,014,250 likes And a day later: 28,023,918 likes Mitt Romney: 5,332,105 likes on August 28, 2012 A day later, after the GOP convention nominated him: 5,440,065 likes And a day later: 5,482,806 likes First, from these data it appears that Obama is more liked than Romney by a ratio of five to one (although, as president for almost four years now, Obama has had more of a chance to collect "like" clicks). Then, we see some interesting trends here: Obama gained roughly 10,000 "likes" a day over two days. But Romney gained more than 100,000 "likes" the day he was formally nominated by the GOP at the convention in Tampa, and more than 40,000 "likes" the following day. It appears to me that following the two "like" counts, for Obama and for Romney, might be an interesting way of tracking something that may act as a proxy toward the popular vote on November 6 as we move through time -- something like a continuous kind of opinion poll. I italicize "might," and I am being very tentative here, because of the cautionary tale of the Literary Digest. I think that this might be an interesting pair of statistics to follow as they change through time precisely because I want to know whether or not there is a bias in using Facebook as an indication of who might win the election. Is using Facebook like using phone numbers in 1936? -- meaning, is there an inherent bias here? The income element is probably not there: Facebook users are not, by any indication, either richer or poorer than nonusers. But with Facebook there may be two potential sources of bias: one is age, and the other is sensitivity to privacy issues. It appears that Facebook users may tend toward younger segments of the population, but I don't know whether this is a fact; and many non-users seem to have an obsession with "privacy." If age and sensitivity to privacy move voters either to the left or to the right, then using Facebook as an indicator of who is likely to win the November election, as measured at a given moment in time, is flawed. Otherwise, it may be an excellent, fast and easy rough source of some approximate kind of information about where the popular vote might be heading. Another question is whether Facebook users are quick enough to "unlike" a candidate once they change their minds about him. This may be an important hidden factor here. How you can help: You could go to Facebook from time to time and in the "Comments" below paste what you see as the number of "likes" for each candidate. Then, after the election results are out, we will see whether this polling method worked or not (although one result will not necessarily tell us whether the method is biased or not -- the Literary Digest did get it right, by chance, several times before its fatal debacle.) Mashable: Google, Facebook and Twitters friendly rivalry at GOP2012 http://mashable.com/2012/08/31/google-facebook-twitter-republican-convention/

Alex Fitzpatrick August 31, 2012 Google, with its fully decked-out media lounge, backstage Conversation Room and end-of-the-week epic party, was inarguably the most prominent of the technology companies at the Republican National Convention a list that also included Facebook and Twitter. That makes sense Google and YouTube were the official social network and live stream provider of the convention, a role theyre also serving for the Democratic Convention. The company streamed content to hundreds of thousands of viewers and also used the event as a coming of age celebration for Google Hangouts, which were all the rage among media outlets covering the event and the convention organizers. Twitter and Facebook, meanwhile, played second fiddle. However, they still made quite the impact. The two shared a co-working space perhaps in an effort to join forces against rival Google that became a cantmiss destination for reporters and socially-savvy politicians, receiving visits from such prominent politicians as Newt Gingrich and House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy. Facebook and Twitter used their space to show off their latest political innovations, including Facebook and CNNs analytics platform and the Twitter Political Index. Twitter and Facebook employees, meanwhile, mingled with one another and talked shop. The two companies made their presence known in other ways, too: a Twitter hashtag, #gop2012, was a part of the official campaign logo and the company kept convention-goers up to date with interesting stats. Meanwhile, Facebook sponsored a party to celebrate innovation and another event for developers to demonstrate several cutting edge political apps built using Open Graph. Despite the technology companies obvious rivalry for attention and business, their representatives sat together on many panels about social medias impact on politics and were warm towards one another, overall displaying a were all in this together attitude towards sparking social innovation in politics. Politicians now have many ways to get their message out there, said Samantha Smith, spokesperson for Google. We all have the same goal, helping people access that information, she added, in reference to Facebook and Twitter. When asked if the competition between the social networks at the convention was intense, Andrew Noyes, manager of public policy communications at Facebook, said I think its the same synergy you see in our shared workplace *with Twitter+. Its a friendly relationship. Joel Kaplan, vice president of public policy at Facebook, offered a similar sentiment but he hinted a bit more at the competition lying beneath the surface. Were excited about 2012 as the first truly social election, Joel Kaplan, VP at Facebook, told Mashable. Were all pulling in the same direction. Were excited about the changes social media is making to politics. Obviously, we think that change should happen on Facebook. Associated Press: In the Digital Age, Is There Room for the Campaign Button http://www.bradenton.com/2012/08/31/4179671/in-the-digital-age-whither-the.html Peter Prengaman August 31, 2012

TAMPA -- Eugene Ola was on a street corner hawking some political buttons with phrases like "Believe in America" and featuring photos of a smiling GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan. But most passersby simply smiled and kept on walking, barely looking at the piece of cardboard he carted around with 50 buttons fastened to it. In this era of high-tech and non-stop social networking, the campaign button has lost its luster as a central way to promote candidates and their causes. Politicians and their parties instead push their messages with a relentless barrage of television ads, emails and mobile phone alerts, while many voters express their opinions via tweets, Facebook posts and blogs. "Maybe they are just going out of fashion," said Ola, 60, who lives in Washington, D.C., and travels the country selling paraphernalia at political gatherings, football games and medical conferences. Buttons extolling the Republican ticket and tearing into Democrats haven't disappeared entirely, but they are far from ubiquitous. The days when many delegates were seen littered with partisan messages from seemingly head to toe appear to be long past. Today, attendees roaming the convention halls are more likely to have an iPhone strapped to their belt or a Bluetooth hanging from one ear than a button with Romney's picture fastened to their lapel. "We have had pictures of our buttons taken a thousand times," said Jane Morton, 46, who traveled with her 19-year-old son from Kansas City to sell buttons that say "Show 44 the door," and depict a foot kicking a cartoon image of Obama. "I guess people are just into digital media these days." Campaign buttons have been part of American politics since the days of President George Washington. Some of the first buttons were sewn on clothes, or worn similar to a necklace. Those eventually gave way to metal buttons with fastening pins. These days, the most modern form is the digital variety -- "buttons" decorating candidate websites, emails to potential voters and on social networking sites. To communicate their messages, campaigns have fully moved to online media, said Evan Cornog, a presidential historian and dean of the school of communication at Hofstra University. Increasing urbanization and longer commutes have also likely had a role in diminishing the usefulness of buttons, he said. "Who is going to see your button on the Long Island Expressway?" he said. The hotter the campaign, the more intense the interest in buttons. The historic nature of the 2008 campaign, for example, by virtue of Barack Obama -- the nation's first black president -- being on the ballot made them more collectible. And there were plenty of opportunities for some catchy phrases that worked well, like: "Sarah Palin, the hottest governor from the coldest state," juxtaposing the photogenic looks of the Republican vice presidential nominee and her state of Alaska. Even if fewer people wear them and their effectiveness is muted, vendors say they don't have to sell many to turn a profit because production costs are low. Morton, who was laid off in May from a product development firm, says her buttons cost $0.30 to make and she sells them for $3. And most vendors supplement by selling a wide range of other items, like hats, handkerchiefs and T-shirts.

Many conventiongoers buying buttons appear to be collecting them as souvenirs. "I have buttons from every Republican ticket since World War II," said Andrew Malcolm, 69, a Los Angelesbased columnist who on Wednesday night bought a button, and then promptly put it in his pocket, before entering the convention hall. Are they on display at home? "I just have them in a bag," he said, adding wryly that if he ever wanted to put them on a wall it would require "some serious negotiations with my wife." Tech President: At Republican National Convention, Romneys Digital Director Hints at New App http://techpresident.com/news/22796/republican-national-convention-romneys-digital-director-dishesnew-app Nick Judd August 30, 2012 In the run-up to Mitt Romney's speech Thursday night announcing his acceptance of the Republican nomination for the presidency, his digital team has been busy. On a public Google Hangout Thursday afternoon, Romney's digital director, Zac Moffatt, announced that the campaign will soon roll out an event app that will handle event ticketing and provide a "social" component by pulling in Twitter and Facebook posts during a several-hour period around events. The campaign did not immediately return an emailed request for comment; I'll update the post if they do. The upcoming app is not the only thing Team Romney has been up to. Over the weekend, the campaign rolled out "Victory Wallets," an analog to the one-click donations feature Barack Obama's campaign and the software firm Blue State Digital released earlier this year. "In just one step, you can make donations via the Internet, email, or mobile phone," the campaign announced Aug. 25, in an email listed as coming from Moffatt. By storing credit card information where the campaign can access it again in the Democrats' case, with a provider that already handles credit card information, not with the campaign itself Romney's team can ask donors to re-authorize subsequent donations. It's also been reported that the Romney campaign is gearing up to roll out donations by text. In an arrangement pursued by people in both parties and approved by the Federal Election Commission earlier this summer, campaigns can collect small donations when users send a given text message to a specific shortcode. The donation is charged to the donor's cellphone bill, but an intermediary essentially fronts the money to the campaign until the bills are paid. The Obama campaign announced last week that it had its own version of that functionality up and running. Victory Wallet is the latest example of the Romney campaign going technologically tit-for-tat with Team Obama. Prior to this, Team Romney rolled out a custom Square application to collect donations at events. The campaign announced this feature just a few days after Obama's digital group released more or less the same functionality for their supporters. TechPresident recently noticed online ads appearing for Romney and Obama on the front page of the Tampa Bay Times website.

But Moffatt says that his staff, which expanded after the campaign shifted from the primary to the general election, is not trying to compete with their opposite numbers. "We don't have to run against Barack Obama's digital team," Moffatt said Thursday. "We have to do what's necessary to be successful in November." Moffatt shared the hangout stage with National Republican Congressional Committee digital director Gerrit Lansing, former Republican National Committee digital director Cyrus Krohn, Engage co-founder Patrick Ruffini, and Lori Weberg, new media director for Sen. Roy Blunt. All Facebook: Facebook Highlights GOP-Flavored Apps Over Drinks at Republican Convention http://allfacebook.com/facebook-highlights-gop-flavored-apps-over-drinks-at-republicanconvention_b98629 Jennifer Moire August 30, 2012 The six hottest political apps for Facebook were the talk of Tampa, Fla. today during the social networks cocktail reception theyre calling Apps and Drinks. Facebook held its first Apps and Drinks event at the Republican National Convention today with a similar event planned next week in Charlotte, N.C., when the Democrats have their turn in the spotlight. Apps are the craze this election cycle. Gov. Mitt Romneys campaign drew attention some unwanted with its VP app that was designed to deliver information in the lead up to the selection of Rep. Paul Ryan. The politicos are taking advantage of Facebooks unique sharing and commenting capabilities, recognizing that users are more likely to be swayed by the opinions of their friends. Facebook also released some statistics about this election season:

This year, there are now more people in the U.S. on Facebook than voted in the 2008 election. According to Pew, people on Facebook are 57 percent more likely to persuade a friend or co-worker to vote, 2.5 times more likely to attend an event or rally and 43 percent more likely to vote themselves. There are 110,000 political Facebook Pages in the US. Of those: o 11,000 are politician Pages o 2,600 are Pages for government officials o 1,620 are Pages for political parties o 31,890 are Pages for government organizations o 7,140 are Pages for political organizations o 43,500 are for community organizations o 12,500 are Pages for community government

Heres a look at the apps Facebook is highlighting today:

Votizen: Using Facebook login, Votizen allows users to their see how their friends are registered to vote, and campaign with them to elect candidates with shared values. 1.5 million voters have been reached with Votizen, 5,000 candidates can be found in the system and the average user is connected to 241 voters.

WeforPresident: WeforPresident connects users with information about key political issues, events and candidates. People who log in with Facebook can engage in debates, register to vote and find organizations that match their political interests, and share activity back to Facebook. Republican National Committees Social Victory Center: The RNC launched this Open Graph-powered app to make it easy for people to find ways to volunteer, encourage people to vote and keep up to date on election issues. Since launching in May, the app has generated nearly one million impressions. Interestingly, nearly 50 percent of users became active around the time of the Wisconsin gubernatorial recall. NationBuilder: NationBuilder enables candidates to organize communities, online and offline. Campaigns can connect via Facebook and tap into a range of social tools, such as Facebook Events. Facebook-CNN I Voted app: The Facebook-CNN I Voted app makes it easy for people on Facebook to make their voices heard. With the app, people can share their commitment to vote and to endorse the candidates and issues that matter most to them. Convention Without Walls: Created by the RNC, this app enables people to share pictures or videos of themselves that express their individual, American stories. People can also easily connect and share with their friends as well as Republicans across the country, by joining groups matching their interests.

While not an app, theres an impressive use of technology at these conventions between Facebook and GigaPan. Conventioneers can use their Facebook login to tag themselves and their friends in panoramic photos taken nightly inside the Tampa Bay Times Forum and posted the next day at GOPConvention2012.com. A touchscreen monitor inside the Forum enables attendees to view themselves in the photos. Readers: Do you plan on using any Facebook apps between now and Election Day in November? Talking Points Memo: Facebook Promotes Political Apps http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/facebook-promotes-political-apps Carl Franzen August 30, 2012 Facebook on Thursday released a list of third party political apps (not that kind of "third party" -- these are apps made by software developers outside the company) that it says are "expanding the sphere of political engagement" on the world's largest social network. Facebook points to the apps as examples of what it would like to see from developers going forward, as well as what it hopes users will turn to as political campaigning increasingly occurs online. Two of the apps Facebook spotlights, the RNC Social Victory Center and the Convention Without Walls, were made by the Republican National Committee. None of the apps highlighted are from official Democrat organizations. Here's the full list, via Facebook:

Votizen WeforPresident RNC Social Victory Center NationBuilder Facebook-CNN I Voted app Convention Without Walls

Facebook also noted it had invited the creators of the apps to an "Apps and Drinks" event this week in Tampa, Florida. Voice of America: Live from Tampa! Sort Of http://blogs.voanews.com/digital-frontiers/2012/08/30/live-from-tampa-sort-of/ Doug Bernard August 30, 2012 A colleague in Washington asked me today: So, are you getting to see much of Tampa while youre at the convention? Im quite sure they had no idea just how funny that was. While Republican delegates are whooping it up on the arena floor of the Tampa Times Forum or spending off hours at swanky restaurants there are thousands of journalists, bloggers and other malcontents grinding away on the barren concrete floors of the neighboring Tampa Convention Center. (For the record, it will be exactly the same at the Democratic convention next week in Charlotte.) Covering conventions may be many things, but swank is not among them. In the eight Ive attended so far, its always the same. The hours are grueling, the food is fried, the coffee cold and your feet swollen. Not that Im complaining (much.) Or that there arent exceptions here and there. Take the Google lounge here in Tampa. Unlike the harsh light and drab surroundings of most working areas, the Google lounge is colorful and cool, brimming with hip displays and tired reporters catching up on the news or with each other. Were really here to create conversations, says Google spokesman Daniel Sieberg.Theres a lot of things we think are important to the political discourse, so were here in a non-partisan format to just have that conversation here at the RNC, and then next week at the DNC, too. One of the ways frankly, the very cool ways that Google is hosting that conversation is with something called the Google+ Hangout Studio. An instant TV studio in a plastic cube, the set is plopped down in the middle of the Google lounge, bringing delegates and activists together with people the world over joining via video chats on Google+. Its a loose and varied conversation, which is exactly what one would expect on the subject of politics.* Not that many in the lounge seem to be paying attention. Apart from the free coffee, the biggest draw in the Google lounge, and just about everywhere else in Tampa, seems to be anything on the mobile phone. Wifi isnt just a nicety here its a necessity. A lot of people said 2008 was going to be the social convention. Now, I think were blowing that out of the water, says Facebooks Andrew Noyes without much hyperbole. While Facebook, Twitter and other social networks were up and running in 2008, they felt more like a side bar for many attendees, and the campaigns didnt go much further than offering up a website or sending out news releases on Twitter. Four years later, its a different world. Everybody here, whether youre a delegate or a journalist, has a new focus on social media and sharing, says Noyes. Hes correct everybody here has at least one mobile device, and they are very much in use, as evidenced by the constant finger swiping. Want to find someone for an interview? Dont bother phoning nobody picks up anymore. Send a text, tweet at them, chat them on any number of platforms.

But all this leaves one to wonder: just how much sharing is too much? Can there possibly that much interesting happening here? The answer is probably not; but woe be unto you if you happen to miss the one big thing just because you were unconnected for five minutes. With noses firmly planted in glowing screens, everyones trying to keep a millisecond ahead of the next guy at the convention. (For example, one next guy, former colleague and still friend Don Gonyea with NPR has adorned his Facebook page with much more convention stuff than I have.) Which leads to a paradox: with all that sharing and immediate access to information, its become easier than ever to forget that theres a whole world of news still happening. Old hands call it the Convention Hole. I prefer to think of it as tunnel vision. Whoever you are, when youre here, the rest of the world tends to evaporate into a blur of speeches, security cordons and balloons. Speaking only for myself, Im finding my mobile device only amplifies that, turning a sea of global information into a trickle of convention trivia. And I cant be the only one. Not like this will change anything. American conventions and politics are increasingly an online sport, whether digi-skeptics such as myself like it or not. The task now seems to be not whether to embrace social media, but rather to learn how to manage it. Everything else being equal, its all a little overwhelming. Lucky thing theres always the Google coffee. The Hill: Facebook Lets Users Tag Themselves in Convention Panorama http://thehill.com/blogs/twitter-room/other-news/246683-facebook-lets-users-tag-themselves-inconvention-panorama Alicia Cohn August 30, 2012 Facebook is offering users attending the Republican National Convention this week a chance to show off their spot in history. This week, Facebook promoted Gigapan, an app that allows users to find themselves in a 360 degree panorama shot of the audience at the convention. Logging into Facebook through the application allows users to zoom in with almost shocking detail, find themselves or friends in the audience, and tag themselves. The shared photo -- which includes an audience of thousands at Ann Romney's speech on Tuesday night -will show up on their timeline. The Republican National Convention featured the tool on their official blog on Wednesday. More panorama shots from additional nights of the convention are expected. Facebook wants convention attendees to share every moment in real-time with their friends. The social networking site brought four "Photo Spots" to Tampa, where convention visitors can quickly upload photos to their timelines without waiting for access to a computer. Attendees can also access photos at a touch-screen monitor at the Facebook workspace in the Tampa Bay Times Forum. Facebook is also monitoring a spike in conversation about the Republican presidential ticket's Mitt Romney and Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.) on the social networking site this week, although Facebook data provided to CNN shows that when President Obama was in Iowa on Wednesday, Facebook chatter in that particular swing state was a lot more "blue" than the rest of the country has been this week.

POLITICO: Tech Branding Is All Over Tampa GOP Fete http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/80461.html?hp=r15 Steve Friess 08/30/2012 TAMPA, Fla. Walk through the Republican National Convention and it might start to feel as much like a technology trade show as political nominating party, thanks to the branding and lobbying efforts of dozens of tech companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter and AT&T. Google wants attendees to sip free lattes in a huge, colorfully designed rec room. Facebook invites attendees to snap pictures at photo booths that post the image direct to a user's wall. Twitter's giving out Tshirts. And AT&T's logo is on RNC signage throughout downtown Tampa, the perk of being the event's "official wireless carrier." The oversized show of force is a big change for many tech companies from Apple to Yelp that didn't used to pay much heed to politics or Washington D.C. Now they spend big to fete lawmakers and send representatives to work the rooms as other industries long have. You have companies spending more time dealing with regulation, dealing with Congress, dealing with the administration, and realizing they need a voice, said Rey Ramsey, president and CEO of TechNet. Our power is directly commensurate with the awareness that the tech industry is so vital to the United States economy. It helps, of course, that tech is a rare bright spot in an otherwise shaky economy. Being present allows politicians to bask in the reflected glow of techs record on job creation and innovation, something they're pleased to take credit for however unwarranted. From sponsoring elaborate parties with free-flowing food and wine to hawking their wares on the political elite, the industry came to play and, in some cases, pay, as sponsorships can cost up to millions of dollars in goods and services. On Thursday alone, Broadband For America sponsors a panel on the nations digital infrastructure, Facebook holds an invite-only "Apps & Drinks" event for various politics-related app designers to show off their wares to politicians and journalists, and Google wraps up its dominant RNC excursion by linking with the Young Guns Network for one last blowout bash. And those are just the events made public. Behind the scenes and away from the cameras, companies as predictable as Microsoft and Apple or as surprising as Tumblr and Uber are bending the ears of officeholders and hopefuls in hopes theyll make such matters as tax policy and cybersecurity legislation go their ways. For us its not about sponsoring a ton of events, its really about being present in the room, making sure members have our app installed on their iPhones and iPads, said Luther Lowe, director of public policy at Yelp, at Tuesdays Innovation Nation party put on to by CEA, ESA, BSA, TechNet and others to fete Reps. Darrell Issa and Kevin McCarthy. Weve got a great story to tell, and we want to be able to educate policymakers and their staff about how people using Yelp in their district. Its a coming-of-age landmark for many in this industry. Several noted that their members barely understood how much political power they held or why it mattered until the debate over SOPA and PIPA early this year. After a coordinated effort to protest legislation many viewed as stifling to innovation that included blackouts by Wikipedia, Tumblr and others, the bills were spiked and the tech world realized it could impact public policy in a big way.

Thus, the arrival en masse in Tampa and Charlotte, something that has not gone unnoticed in the halls of power. The tech industry is stronger and better organized than ever, said McCarthy, the House Majority Whip and Southern California representative, before headlining a Wednesday lunch panel sponsored by Google and Bloomberg. Before, when youd go to the tech community youd talk to tech people. Now, Im seeing young people who are in politics working in the tech community also. Youre beginning to see a marriage of what tech can do to open up politics as well as the tech community understanding how these policies affect them. Like any big, diverse industry, different companies have different priorities. The Business Software Alliance, for instance, has IP protection atop its list, whereas Yelp is focused on ways to bolster free-speech protections for the commenters who fuel the sites ratings and advice. There is one uniting issue, however loosening up regulations to allow highly skilled foreigners to work in the U.S. Every tech executive and lobbyist interviewed by POLITICO in Tampa mentioned how the struggle to find qualified labor is inhibiting their ability to grow and, in turn, help revive the stagnated economy. If you ask any CEO here which would they rather have, lower taxes or more visas for high-skilled workers, every one would take the visas any day of the week, insisted Joe Green, CEO and co-owner of the campaign software maker NationBuilder. That prediction proved true. GOP leaders spoke from the convention podium about the importance of changing the tax structure to unleash innovation, but few industry figures at panels and events dwelled on that. Instead, they bemoaned the troubled public education system and urged better intellectual property protections. CEO Jeremy Heimans, founder of the tech startup consultancy Purpose, said he has complained to Republican officials in Tampa that the debate is so boringly focused on the role of government versus the role of the private sector in the most generic possible way. The Republican party focus on taxes as being the be-all and end-all of what is required for innovation is just ludicrous, Heimans said. Its about so much more than low taxes. If it was just about low taxes, people would be setting up businesses with real employees in the Cayman Islands. Heimanss remarks were a rare example of direct, public partisanship. While Silicon Valley is a hotbed of social liberalism and Democrats, most tried to strike a balance so as to keep avenues of communication open on both sides of the aisle. Ramsey, for instance, said that Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney gets it on tech because hes visited the Valley frequently and has a background in starting businesses so hell do pretty well. But he balanced that by noting that President Barack Obama has been very accessible to the tech sector and also has made several pilgrimages to innovative companies across the country. While many of the same lobbyists and execs visit regularly in Washington D.C. with the same politicians and staffers, they said doing so away from the shadow of the Capitol dome has important merits.

Youre dealing with people in a more relaxed setting, and thats better, said Matthew Reid, senior vice president of the Business Software Alliance. Its great for relationship-building and for seeding some issues that will be covered in greater detail. The industrys other purpose in Tampa and Charlotte hawking its wares is evident everywhere around Tampa. Well-known social media outlets, from Twitter to LinkedIn, are joined by lesser-known rising stars like Eventbrite, an ticket management site that this year is handling most Romney campaign events, including the rollout of vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan in Norfolk, Va. Tumblr, too, is on hand to teach public officials how to use the blogging site better. I see Tumblr as a particularly good platform for open government and putting constituents in touch with their representatives, said Liba Rubenstein, the sites first director of outreach for causes and politics. Being at the RNC and DNC, she said, is an experiment for us. Some have thrown their lots in with seasoned Hill vets hired by nascent trade associations and consortiums. Most of the people I work with and interact with are very inexperienced in terms of the political realm, said Engines Edward Goodmann, a former Senate intern and longtime policy analyst. Theyve never dealt with Washington, so this is a learning experience for them and I think its a learning experience for the policymakers as well because they dont know as much as they think they know. Nonetheless, there is some culture clash. Older GOP lawmakers are accustomed to dealing with business leaders their age in suits and ties. Many tech-related executives are under 30 and in Tampa showed up for speeches, meetings and parties in far less formal attire. That takes some getting used to, acknowledged Scott Case, CEO of Startup America, after he appeared on a lunch forum hosted by Huffington Post CEO Arianna Huffington that also included LinkedIn co-founder Allen Blue and Microsoft lawyer Brad Smith. Whenever people come from different backgrounds and different points of view, theres going to be a culture clash, but I think its more surprising how much we have in common, Case said. Then, pointing to his own clothes a tieless, untucked striped shirt, jeans and gym shoes he said, Most people we work with on all levels of government are much more open to your ideas and accomplishing something than they are concerned about whether youre wearing red, white and blue sneakers or not. CNN: CNNs Gut Check for August 30, 2012 http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/30/cnns-gut-check-for-august-30-2012-2/ Mark Peterson and Michelle Jaconi August 30, 2012 CNN's GUT CHECK | for August 30, 2012 | 4 p.m. - n. a pause to assess the state, progress or condition of the political news cycle BREAKING: TEXAS VOTER ID LAW STRUCK DOWN A federal appeals court in Washington has struck down the Texas law that required photo identification for voters at the polls. The decision is a major victory for the Obama administration and its Democratic allies, who had challenged the law. The courts decision today and the decision earlier this week on the Texas redistricting plans not only reaffirm but help protect the vital role the Voting Rights Act plays in our society to ensure that every American has the right to vote and to have that vote counted, said Attorney General Eric Holder in a written statement. Terry Frieden

DIRTY HARRY WILL BE IN THE BUILDING Legendary actor Clint Eastwood is, in fact, tonights surprise speaker at the Republican National Convention. According to reporting by CNNs Deirdre Walsh, Eastwood will soon do a walk through of the Tampa Bay Times Forum in preparation for his remarks. TRAIL TRIVIA (Answer below) Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. Who said this at the 1964 Republican convention? MARK (@PrestonCNN) & MICHELLE (@MJaconiCNN) What caught our eye today in politics Tonight will be about moments - The most important moment in Mitt Romneys political life - The moment when Romney introduces his faith to the American people - The Marco Rubio moment - The Olympic moment when more than a dozen athletes take the stage - The Hollywood moment when Clint Eastwood strolls onto the stage - The moment when 120,000 balloons rain down from the ceiling that will help shape the rest of Mitt Romneys life, perhaps Barack Obamas life and maybe the future direction of the country. A Romney adviser tells us that the former governor will make his case to the American people in a speech that can be separated into four segments: - A philosophical underpinning about what he believes what the role of government should be - Biographical - How he thinks government should interact with people - And how his vision contrasts Obama In the hours leading up to Romneys speech, he will turn to friends, family and supporters to help tell his story. There will be members of his church on the stage talking about how he has helped people get through difficult times fully opening the door on his Mormon faith, which is not widely understood. Olympians will also take the stage to express their support for him as will Clint Eastwood one of the few Republicans from Hollywood. This evening will also provide Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, with an opportunity to introduce himself to the nation. Rubio, the rising star, could make a run for president himself in 2016 if Romney loses in November. Tonight we will be watching a moment in history. Come tomorrow, though, our attention will turn north to Charlotte where we will be doing it all over again except with the Democrats. the LEDE Did you miss it? Leading CNNPolitics: For Romney, the speech of his life The challenge for Mitt Romney as he accepts the Republican presidential nomination is to push past the the

stiff and reserved perception that's been created for him by opponents and comedians and make a heartfelt and profound appeal to the millions of Americans who will be watching his speech Thursday night. Halimah Abdullah Leading Drudge: Another week, another 374,000 jobless claims... The number of Americans filing new claims for jobless benefits was unchanged last week, pointing to a labor market that was treading water. Initial claims for state unemployment benefits were a seasonally adjusted 374,000, the Labor Department said on Thursday. The prior week's figure was revised up to show 2,000 more applications than previously reported. Leading HuffPo: Awash In Secret Donations, Republicans Reverse Support For Campaign Finance Disclosure Outside of the Tampa Bay Times Forum, where the Republican convention is taking place, independent conservative groups huddle in strategy sessions and hold laudatory events for some of their mega-donors, at least those who are willing to disclose their names. But those not willing to be named are the real story. Secret donors and the groups that accept their money have become central to the Republican Party's plan to win the White House and take full control over Congress. Paul Blumenthal Leading Politico: Mitt Romney's make-or-break night Mitt Romney is about to face the most important political moment of his life. The speech Romney delivers at the Republican National Conventions final night in Tampa will be one of his last opportunities to sketch a portrait of who he is and what he stands for to a country whose battleground states have seen him relentlessly portrayed by the Obama campaign as a heartless corporate raider a perception that has dented his approval ratings and made it difficult for the GOP to change the campaign narrative. Maggie Haberman Leading The New York Times: Republican Women Play Down Social Issues About a block from the Republican National Convention, in a strip mall next to a Hooters restaurant, is the Woman Up! Pavilion, sponsored by the Young Guns Network, a super PAC promoting conservative candidates. What is missing from the all-inclusive spot? Any discussion of the social issues abortion, samesex marriage, insurance coverage for birth control that have at times engulfed the Republican nominating contest. Susan Saulny TRAIL MOMENTS The political bites of the day Democrats hammer Ryan on inaccuracies in prime-time speech JIM MESSINA, OBAMAS CAMPAIGN MANAGER, IN A FUNDRAISING E-MAIL TO SUPPORTERS: If you've seen any coverage of Paul Ryan's speech in Tampa, you know that the consensus among journalists and independent observers is that it was ... factually challenged. He lied about Medicare. He lied about the Recovery Act. He lied about the deficit and debt. He even dishonestly attacked Barack Obama for the closing of a GM plant in his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin, a plant that closed in December 2008 under George W. Bush. He also failed to offer one constructive idea about what he would do to move the country forward. Ryan campaign defends speech, says it was factually accurate BRENDAN BUCK, RYAN SPOKESMAN FOR ROMNEY CAMPAIGN, IN A STATEMENT TO THE PRESS: Ryan voted against the plan because it didnt do enough on the big driver of our debt: health care. To that point, he worked on the commission with Democrat Alice Rivlin to put together a comprehensive health

entitlement plan. The statement was factually accurate and gets to a fundamental contrast: Were proposing meaningful solutions to balance the budget while the president is on the sidelines. Jeb comfortable with Romneys immigration policy, but tone can be better FORMER FLORIDA GOV. JEB BUSH IN AN INTERVIEW WITH CNN: I think the tone can be better. I'm more interested in what president to be Mitt Romneys views are, and I am comfortable with those views. I think he will be a president that will try to solve our immigration problem by securing the border, but then turning this conversation into how can we create sustained economic growth by using a catalytic converter for growth in the pursuit of dreams, and that's an immigration policy that allows people to come in legally and be able to add value and vitality to our country. Obama complimentary on Romneys walk the walk faith PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA IN AN INTERVIEW WITH TIMES MICHAEL SCHERER: He strikes me as somebody who is very disciplined. And I think that that is a quality that obviously contributed to his success as a private equity guy. I think he takes his faith very seriously. And as somebody who takes my Christian faith seriously, I appreciate that he seems to walk the walk and not just be talking the talk when it comes to his participation in his church. More conventions, less reality television JAY LENO ON HIS LATE NIGHT TALK SHOW: Did you all watch the convention last night? That's good to see scripted television finally making a comeback. TOP TWEETS What stopped us in 140 characters or less Mark Joyella (@standupkid) The only reason I can think a smart person would identify as an "undecided" voter is that they just want to meet Tom Foreman and get on TV. Glen Johnson (@globeglen) MASS. SENATE: Brown describes self as "pro-choice" candidate several times and says Warren wants race nationalized. #mapoli Jill Lawrence (@JillDLawrence) Obama tells Time why his 2nd term would be different. One reason: no more GOP imperative to make him a 1-term prez. http://ti.me/PSOy2F Dan Szematowicz (@CNNDan) From @LisaDCNN, the story of the youngest GOP delegate: Meet Evan Draim http://cnnradio.cnn.com/2012/08/30/meet-evan-draim/ #cnn via @CNN Paul Ryan (@PaulRyanVP) The issue is not the economy as @BarackObama inherited it, not the economy as he envisions it, but as we are living it. #RomneyRyan2012 TRIVIA ANSWER

Some have called Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona the ideological father of the current Republican Party and at the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco, the Republicans nominee for president outlined his views on conservative principles. Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, he said. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. The line was a hit: The packed Cow Palace arena in San Francisco went crazy, the crowd maintaining their applause for so long that Goldwater was forced to stop his speech, thank the crowd for the ovation and raise his hands like a victorious warrior. Though many reporters and pundits expected Goldwater to temper his far-right conservative views in his run for the presidency, this speech made it clear that the senator was going to do nothing of the sort. And while Goldwater would end up getting trounced by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 64 presidential election (the Republicans won only Arizona Goldwaters home state and the Deep South), it was statements like this that earned him the nickname Mr. Conservative. The 1964 run was a turning point moment for the Republican Party as it was the partys first strong showing in the Deep South since Reconstruction. Need proof? While Goldwater won Mississippi with 87% of the vote in 1964, he still failed to reach the massive 98% mark that Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt hit in 1936. GUT CHECK WINNERS CIRCLE (why arent you in it) She may have been second place yesterday, but LeticiainDC (@LeticiainDC) shoots and scores today. A close second goes to Greg Dean (@gregdean11), Puck Buddys (@PuckBuddys) and sfpelosi (@sfpelosi). Congrats to all! P.S. While we are glad that Gut Check favorite Abby Livingston (@RollCallAbby) decided to play Gut Check Trivia, we regret to inform her that the answer was not Ronald Reagan. WHAT TO WATCH TONIGHT: 5:00PM 5:30 PM: CNN's Political Gut Check co-authors Mark Preston and Michelle Jaconi will host a Google hangout to announce CNN & Klouts Top 5 GOP Political Strategists in social media. Preston and Jaconi will be joined by Republican Adviser Richard Grenell. Watch at YouTube.com/CNN. America Choice 2012: Republican National Convention coverage beings at 7:00 pm live from multiple locations inside the convention hall. Speeches include: 7 p.m. Rep. Connie Mack, Newt and Callista Gingrich, Craig Romney 8 p.m. Gov. Jeb Bush (FL), Bob White, chairman of Romney for President campaign, Grant Bennett, Tom Stemberg 9 p.m. Former Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey, Jane Edmonds, former Massachusetts Secretary of Workforce, Olympians Michael Eruzione, Derek Parra and Kim Rhode 10 p.m. Sen. Marco Rubio introduces presidential nominee Mitt Romney

24/7 SOCIAL WATCH #CNNGrill: - Check out our Facebook-CNN Election Insights tool, during the speeches to chart the spikes in political discussion on Facebook - including states, age and gender breakdown. You can find more dynamic, real-time charts and visualizations at CNN.com/electioninsights. CNN: CNNs Gut Check for August 29, 2012 http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/29/cnns-gut-check-for-august-29-2012-2/ Mark Peterson and Michelle Jaconi August 29, 2012 CNN's GUT CHECK | for August 29, 2012 | 4 p.m. - n. a pause to assess the state, progress or condition of the political news cycle BREAKING: RYAN TO DECONSTRUCT THE OBAMA AGENDA IN SPEECH A Republican source familiar with the speech that Rep. Paul Ryan will deliver tonight tells CNNs Dana Bash that the vice presidential candidate will spend most of the policy section of his speech on economic issues in his wheel house. Ryan, says the source, will split his speech into thirds and discuss his Medicare plan (including Obamacare), the stimulus program and the national debt. Another source breaks down the weeks Republican messaging plan for CNNs Candy Crowley: "Ann Romney describes Mitt as the man for the job. Christie talks about need to tell the truth to the American people about the problems we face. Ryan introduces himself and Romney as the ticket of big ideas... all pointing toward Mitt Romney tomorrow night." SOCIAL WATCH: One of the coolest views of Ann Romneys speech last night was right on our own website, where the CNN Facebook Election Insights showed how discussion among women turned to Romney coast to coast as Ann Romneys speech progressed. Read and see the time lapse graphics and watch tonight to see how the different demographics on the main page react in real time to Rep. Paul Ryans speech. TRAIL TRIVIA (Answer below) Who said the existence of beach volleyball is what freedom is all about in a speech at the 1996 GOP convention? MARK (@PrestonCNN) & MICHELLE (@MJaconiCNN) What caught our eye today in politics Tropical Storm Isaac is continuing to pound Louisiana with rain, which is not going to let up as the Republican National Committee gavels into session at 7 p.m. ET. It is no longer a hurricane and there are no plans to alter tonights schedule, but convention officials tell us they are keeping an eye on the storm as we all are here in Tampa. CNN journalists are stationed along the Gulf Coast and we will be bringing you any breaking news on the storm. The latest weather. In Tampa, the RNC theme is We can change it and expect the program to leave the stage at times to highlight everyday Americans from the convention floor delivering testimonials on behalf of Mitt Romney.

While the focus last night was Ann Romney and Chris Christie tonight the spotlight is on Paul Ryan. His speech, Romney advisers tell us, is designed to be a prelude into what Governor Romney will talk about tomorrow night. It will focus on the economy, budget and the deficit, a top Romney aide said. We should also expect to hear Ryan talk about who he is and where he comes from to introduce himself to the voters. But expect fireworks earlier in the evening. Mike Huckabee is expected to be critical of President Obama and will acknowledge that he and Romney were one time adversaries, but they are now united to defeat Barack Obama, a top Romney aide tells CNN. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky will also address the convention this evening in a speech that will criticize the president and praise Romney. Adding to the current and future generations Republican stars, some names from the past will resurface tonight to show unity for the Republican ticket: 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. We will be watching this Republican all star line-up from Tampa, we hope you join us at home on CNN television and CNNPolitics.com. the LEDE Did you miss it? Leading CNNPolitics: Five things we learned at the Republican National Convention The first full day of the Republican National Convention was heavy with female speakers and light on the red meat that normally fires up the base. Here are five things we learned from the convention's first night. Paul Steinhauser and Kevin Liptak Leading Drudge: Out: Yahoo News Chief Says Romneys 'Happy To Have A Party When Black People Drown'... Yahoo just announced they have terminated Chalian effective immediately. John Nolte on Breitbart.com Leading HuffPo: In Tampa Suburb, Extreme Poverty Arrives While Jobs Remain Distant Having spent most of his life in a low-income neighborhood on the outskirts of Tampa, Raymond Smith has long recognized that being poor in the suburbs is quite a bit different from being poor downtown. "It would be good if we had a bus that run out here," the 51-year-old Smith lamented as Hurricane Isaac blew past town on Monday, spitting rain on his neighbors who had to bike to the store or to work. "There's no transportation, and its a lot of people out here. Things are tight." Dave Jamieson Leading Politico: Mitt Romney: A placeholder for next GOP generation Ask the rising stars of the GOP about their partys future and two names repeatedly come up. Neither of them is Mitt Romney. One of them, Ronald Reagan, was born in 1911; the other, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, in 1970. Jonathan Martin Leading The New York Times: Fast Rise Built With Discipline Paul D. Ryans uncanny ability to develop relationships with like-minded conservatives while he worked on Capitol Hill helped lay the groundwork for his ascension to vice-presidential candidate. Jennifer Steinhauer and Jonathan Weisman Leading Boston Globe: In his first run, Paul Ryan made lasting mark An examination of that first race 14 years before he would accept the nomination for vice president, as he will on Wednesday night in Tampa foreshadows the type of candidate Paul Ryan would become.

Interviews with his opponent, his family, and his longtime supporters paint a portrait of a canny politician from an aw-shucks town who from the start was determined to take on some of the nations knottiest issues. Matt Viser TRAIL MOMENTS The political bites of the day Perry hits Obama where it hurts: His golf game GOV. RICK PERRY IN AN INTERVIEW WITH CNNS JIM ACOSTA: Obama, on the other hand, has had three and a half years, hundred plus rounds of golf, and America is not economically stable at all. Not everybody plays golf. George Bush did not play golf when we were in the war. This man has his priorities in the wrong place. And even if he was playing golf and helping the economy that would be one thing. But when you are playing golf and the economy is in the tank do your job, take care of what you are there for. Rice: World needs confident U.S. country and markets FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE CONDOLEEZZA RICE AT A DELEGATE BREAKFAST IN TAMPA: Are America's best days behind us? And I want to tell you that as a former secretary of state, it's not just something that Americans wonder. It's something people across the world wonder, too. Because when the United States is not feeling strong and confident at home, it shows. We aren't strong and confident abroad. And when the United States is not willing to speak with a robust voice for free peoples and free markets, the world is a pretty chaotic place. Akin takes party outsider to new level, fundraises against party bosses TODD AKIN IN AN FUNDRAISING E-MAIL: Party bosses and the Washington elite always seem to want to take the easy way out. Those same party bosses and DC insiders have turned their backs on our campaign. But the people of Missouri and folks across this nation said, Not so fast! We have received an outpouring of support from people just like you who are saying No to the party bosses, and saying Yes! to our campaign. Portman not surprised by likability gap SEN. ROB PORTMAN IN AN INTERVIEW ON CNNS STARTING POINT: The likability gap is not a surprise. I mean, in Ohio, we have been bombarded with negative ads and they have been about Mitt Romney and his character. And they are very personal about his business career. Many of them misleading. Some of them downright inaccurate. But if you're an Ohio voter, that's what you've been seeing. TOP TWEETS What stopped us in 140 characters or less Steve Gurley (@steve_gg) Here I come to save the day! ...oh crap I am not the nominee! #ChristiePhotoCaptions Society of Pro Journ (@spj_tweets) Yahoo fires D.C. chief for joking Mitt and Ann Romney OK with black people drowning: http://bit.ly/OrqBzr via @poynter Jon Ralston (@RalstonFlash) .@Reince launches on @SenatorReid again, calls him liar, wonders how he got rich http://sulia.com/c/nevada/f/e2439e12-fb21-4248-9cc4-a1dbbe5e4b12/?source=twitter

Jim Acosta (@jimacostacnn) Ryan is at podium http://instagr.am/p/O7FCXLguYT/ Jeremy Harlan (@jerharlanCNN) RT @GQPolitics: A GQ Guide to Covering a Hurricane When You Were Supposed to Cover a Convention, by @lizzieohreally: http://gqm.ag/Qxsv5n Andrew Rafferty (@AndrewNBCNews) OH delegation is loving Craig Romney right now. Much more at ease and engaging than his brother Josh a few days earlier to same crowd Sean Spicer (@seanspicer) Wash Post ad in Wash Post touting its reach on Cap Hill spells Capitol, Capital... http://pic.twitter.com/Px744Slp TRIVIA ANSWER It is rare that beach volleyball, American patriotism, and political conventions can come together to make an unlikely holy trinity. But at the 1996 Republican National Convention in San Diego, such an opportunity presented itself and one convention speaker seized the occasion. His name: Newt Gingrich. While introducing Olympic beach volleyball gold medalist Kent Steffes, Gingrich looked for a smooth transition. Problem is, his transition ended up overshadowing everything else he said and the line has become another chapter in vintage Gingrich moments. A mere 40 years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning, Gingrich said. No bureaucrat would have invented it, and that's what freedom is all about. Huh? Not surprisingly, Gingrichs volleyball line was not included in the prepared text of his speech. That line was just Newt being Newt. GUT CHECK WINNERS CIRCLE (why arent you in it) We have a first-time Gut Check Trivia winner today. Congratulations to Greg Dean (@gregdean11) for taking home the win today by correctly answering that Newt Gingrich compared beach volleyball to what freedom is all about. Dean had some competition both Peter Ubertaccio (@ProfessorU) and LeticiainDC (@LeticiainDC) were close behind todays Gut Check winner. Houston Chronicle: On Social Media, Obama Has Many More Followers, But Romney Team Says GOP Wins on Quality http://blog.chron.com/txpotomac/2012/08/on-social-media-obama-has-many-more-followers-but-romneyteam-says-gop-wins-on-quality/ Richard Dunham August 29, 2012

Need any evidence that social media is transforming the political discourse in 2012? If you do, consider this: More tweets were sent during the first two days Republicans gathered in Tampa this week than in the entire 2008 election campaign. A decade ago, social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest didnt even exist. Now campaigns hire teams of experts to harness the power of social media to connect with supporters, drive their message, tap into like-minded communities and mobilize turnout. The 24-hour news cycle has become a 140-character one, notes Adam Sharp, Twitters senior manager for government, news and social innovation. California GOP strategist Jonathan Wilcox, a veteran in helping candidates get out their message, says the 2012 Republican convention represents a watershed in the variety and depth of social media content. The first thing that campaigns and elected officials did with social media was ignore it, he said. Then they tried to co-opt it, and that failed. And then they did the crash course. Four years ago, Barack Obamas massive social media advantage over Republican John McCain helped him build support among young voters and maximize turnout across the nation. This year, while Obama holds a wide lead over Republican rival Mitt Romney in metrics such as number of followers and number of tweets, Team Romney insists that Republicans have a higher quality operation that will pay off on election day. It really doesnt matter how many people you have following you, said Zac Moffatt, digital director of the Romney campaign. Its how many people you engage. Moffatt cited, as an example, the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Courts Obamacare decision in June. He said Romney generated nearly 500,000 likes to its Facebook post on the ruling from among his 2.1 million fans a 27 percent response rate while Obama totaled about 460,000 likes from his 27 million fans, a rate of less than 2 percent. We define success as having supporters engaged, active and sharing, Moffatt said. Obamas campaign dismisses the Romney talk as wishful thinking. Since 2007-2008, weve been on the cutting edge of technology and using social networks to reach voters and engage supporters, said Obama spokesman Adam Fetcher. Were ahead of the game on every count. The Obama campaign this year has built on its 2008 efforts with a tool called Dashboard, which allows supporters to create an account, become part of a social network within the campaign, network with local Obama social communities and instantly share activities on sites such as Facebook and Tumblr. Social media is one way in which we can cut through the chatter and empower people to get involved, Fetcher said. Were finding new ways to integrate social media into everything we do. While the two campaigns debate what constitutes social media success, its clear that Obama uses it more often. A recent study by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that the presidents campaign posted nearly four times as much content as the Romney campaign and was active on nearly twice as many

platforms. Obama sent 25 times as many tweets as Romney, had twice as many Facebook likes and YouTube interactions and was retweeted 150,106 times versus 8,601 for Romney. Moffatt dismisses such numbers as vanity metrics and says his campaign has been more effective at using social media to shape the campaign debate. As evidence, he points to the ongoing effort to embarrass President Obama after his you didnt build this comment about American business. The story generated little buzz in the mainstream media, Mofffatt said, but Romney supporters kept a narrative going that wouldnt have happened without social media. Katie Harbath, Facebooks chief liaison with political campaigns, says Romneys digital team deserves credit for its high level of engagement with its core audience. Youve got to have good content thats compelling, she said. The Romney campaign does a great job with this. University of Texas political scientist Sean Theriault says the GOP has gained significant ground in the social media realm. Obama will not have the same advantage as he had in 2008, he said. The Republicans learned their lesson and, quite frankly, Obama taught it to them. I suspect that there will still be a bit of gap, but nothing like what we saw four years ago. Larry Sabato, a veteran campaign-watcher at the University of Virginia, warned political professionals to keep the political role of social media in perspective. Social media is a communications tool, no more, no less, he said. The message matters far more, though. A winning message trumps a winning social media strategy. Reuters: TV Audiences Go Social As Republican Convention Coverage Wanes http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/29/us-usa-campaign-media-idUSBRE87S1GS20120829 Christine Kearney August 29, 2012 (Reuters) - Howling wind, driving rain and potential damage in New Orleans from Hurricane Isaac hasn't yet dampened U.S. Republican convention media coverage, but early TV ratings proved only so-so while many people instead "tuned in" to social networks. Republican fears that Isaac's battering of the U.S. Gulf Coast would steal the spotlight eased on Wednesday, a day after a key speech by Ann Romney, wife of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, stole the show from New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. But the biggest problem for the Republicans was less the hurricane and more dwindling interest in convention-watching by the general public, experts said. "Isaac is sucking out a lot of the oxygen but that's because there wasn't much oxygen in the first place," said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, senior fellow at the University of Southern California's Price School of Public Policy. "Voters and certainly the media are aware these conventions have become hour-long infomercials. There is very little suspense."

Ahead of Tuesday, news of Isaac's path toward the U.S. Gulf Coast revived memories of Hurricane Katrina's destruction seven years ago and threw a spotlight on something the Republican Party would rather forget in its convention week -- the botched relief efforts under George W. Bush, the last Republican president. But even as some networks moved their anchors from the convention in Tampa to Isaac's landfall in New Orleans to cover both events, those interested in politics tuned in to hear Ann Romney personalize her husband and Christie tackle the Obama White House -- whether on TV or the Internet. Preliminary data from Nielsen Media Research showed that more than 20 million Americans watched TV coverage of the Republican convention on Tuesday night in the 10 p.m. EDT hour when Ann Romney took the stage. By contrast, 37.6 million people watched Democratic President Barack Obama's most recent State of the Union speech. About half of the convention's TV audience watched on cable news networks, as Fox News took the lion's share with an average 6.9 million viewers - triple its usual audience. About 11 million watched on broadcast networks NBC, ABC and CBS, which reduced coverage this year to just one hour per night. Comparisons to the equivalent night in 2008 were not available, but TV audiences for U.S. political conventions have fallen steadily in the last 10 years, with the exception of 2008 when little-known Republican Sarah Palin captured attention. CONVENTION COVERAGE CHANGES But the story is different on the Web where, social media experts said, Americans are watching the convention differently from four years ago when Twitter and Facebook were little known. Thousands of people visited social media sites to follow the convention live across Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and YouTube. Topics such as #GOP2012, #RNC and #Romney were high-trending on Twitter, alongside hashtags for Hurricane Isaac. Judging by both pundits and tweets, Ann Romney's rousing, high-stakes speech lined with simplistic talk of love was a show-stopper, succeeding in its goal major of connecting Republicans with female voters and humanizing husband Mitt Romney. "I can't remember a better convention speech by a would-be first lady than Ann Romney delivered," wrote David Frum of The Daily Beast. "Ann Steals the Show" ran the headline on The Huffington Post and CNN delivered the caption "Ann Romney wows the RNC" and quoted reaction as "electric." An opinion piece in The New York Times said she had less impact when comparing herself to mothers struggling to raise children, but connected more in her speech's second half when speaking realistically about her husband privileged background. Ann Romney gathered the most Twitter mentions of the night, peaking at a high of 6,195 tweets per minute at the end of her speech when her husband joined her on stage. The Twitter Political Index measuring tweeters' feeling about a candidate on scale of 1 to 100, 1 being not favorable, saw Ann Romney's score rise from 45 to 83 after the speech.

Facebook and CNN's election insights website also showed a 58 percent increase in users talking about Mitt Romney on Tuesday with the number peaking during Ann Romney's speech. And traditional media outlets such as the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN and Reuters added to social media coverage, live tweeting, Facebooking, blogging, streaming video, and giving former TV watchers more ways to keep up to date. The Republican National Committee's own live stream on YouTube has attracted 292,000 views since Monday and has some 3,200 subscribers. Christie's speech was the second most tweeted-about event at the convention Tuesday, peaking at 6,079 tweets a minute. Unlike Romney, reactions were more mixed. Fox News praised the speech but included debate about whether the governor, who focused more on his achievements in New Jersey than expected, was hard enough on Obama. (Additional reporting by Jill Serjeant and Piya Sinha-Roy; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte, Mary Milliken and Lisa Shumaker) CNN: Romney Gaining Buzz Among Women on Facebook http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/29/romney-gaining-buzz-among-women-on-facebook/ Eric Weisbrod August 29, 2012 (CNN) After the first full day of the Republican National Convention, Mitt Romney is dominating the political conversation among women on Facebook. The Facebook CNN Election Insights tool, which measures the number of people on Facebook talking about the candidates, shows women talking about Mitt Romney more than Barack Obama in every state except Colorado and Iowa, the two states where Obama campaigned on Tuesday. Follow CNN and CNN Politics on Facebook, catch the latest updates from the GOP convention on CNN's 2012 Conventions Live Blog, and check out the CNN Electoral Map and Calculator to game out your own strategy for November. This is a big difference compared to the past seven days of Facebook activity, where the interactive state heat-map shows more women discussing Obama in all of the Western states, Hawaii, and parts of the Midwest and Northeast. The Republican National Convention on Tuesday evening included several high-profile Republican women, such as Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Utah Congressional candidate Mia Love, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, and Mitt Romney's wife Ann Romney. Among men, Mitt Romney has been talked about more than Obama in every state for the last week. The conversation also changes depending on the age of the Facebook user. Eighteen to 24 year-olds are buzzing about Barack Obama the most. Among people over age 55, the chatter skews heavily toward Romney.

The timeline on the Facebook-CNN Insights tool shows a giant spike for the president around 9 p.m. ET Tuesday. This coincides with a Facebook post on Obama's fan page at 9:12pm ET of a picture slamming Christie & Romney, which as of this post had more than 50,000 'likes' and more than 14,000 shares. Late Tuesday night the conversation about Paul Ryan also started rising. At 10:40 p.m. ET, a graphic was posted to Ryan's page announcing the Republican vice presidential candidate surpassed two million followers. As of 12 a.m. ET Wednesday morning, that post drew 86,000 'likes.' Ryan has more than five times the number of Facebook fans as Joe Biden, who is the least discussed of the four major candidates. Obama's page is the most popular, with more than 28 million fans. Mitt Romney has 5.4 million fans. The Facebook-CNN Election Insights measures daily unique mentions, which is the number of people who either include a post or interact with a candidate's fan page at least once a day. This includes both positive and negative posts. More than 160 million Americans are on Facebook. CNN: On the Trail: August 28, 2012 CNN Political Ticker http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/28/on-the-trail-august-28-2012/ CNN Political Unit August 28, 2012 (CNN) As Mitt Romney heads to Tampa on the first day of events for the GOP convention, President Barack Obama hits the campaign trail in Iowa and Colorado Tuesday. See a schedule of the day's events after the jump. 9:30 a.m. ET House Speaker John Boehner and Rep. Darrell Issa address the California Delegation Brunch in Tampa, Florida. 10 a.m. ET Gov. Martin OMalley, Obama Senior Advisor Robert Gibbs, CarMax Founder Austin Ligon, Somerville, MA Mayor Joe Curtatone, former AMPAD Employee and Bain Victim Randy Johnson appear at the DNC "Counter Convention" Press Conference in Tampa. 11:05 a.m ET Romney arrives in Tampa. 12:05 p.m. ET Rep. Paul Ryan, Romney's running mate, arrives in Tampa. 1 p.m. ET Former Sen. Rick Santorum, Gov. Rick Perry, Rep. Michele Bachmann and Rep. Louie Gohmert appear at the RNC for Life and Family Research Council's "Treasure Life" event. 1:10 p.m. ET Obama Delivers remarks at a campaign event at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. 1:30 p.m. ET RNC Co-chairman Sharon Day, Cyndi Graves (President of Florida Federation of GOP Women) Katie Harbath (Manager for Policy Facebook) and Anita MonClief (True the Vote and Editor-in-Chief of Emerging Corruption) speak on the WomanUp "Advocacy Means Business" Panel in Tampa. 7 p.m. ET Boehner, Reince Priebus, congressional candidate Mia Love, Janine Turner, Santorum and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers address the Republican National Convention in Tampa.

7:20: ET Obama Delivers remarks at a campaign event at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado. 8 p.m. ET Sen. Kelly Ayotte, Gov. John Kasich, Gov. Mary Fallin, Gov. Bob McDonnell and Gov. Scott Walker address the Republican National Convention in Tampa. 9 p.m. ET Gov. Brian Sandoval, Sher Valenzuela (small business owner, candidate for DE Lt. Governor), Sen. GOP Candidate Ted Cruz, Artur Davis and Gov. Nikki Haley address the Republican National Convention in Tampa. 10 p.m ET Mrs. Luce' Vela Fortuo, Ann Romney and Gov. Chris Christie address the Republican National Convention in Tampa.

Mashable: Facebook at the RNC: Politicians finally get us http://mashable.com/2012/08/28/facebook-republican-convention/ Alex Fitzpatrick August 28, 2012 The Republican National Convention planners promised this years convention would be the most digital in history, and with all the major social networks having a presence here in Tampa, its living up to that promise. Facebook is among the tech giants roaming the halls the company has become intertwined with the convention, having set up Facebook photo spots and using the opportunity to launch a co-branded political analytics app with CNN. Mashable tracked down the companys U.S. Politics team to find out what its up to during the convention. We spoke with Andrew Noyes, a former journalist who was hired by Facebook in 2009 and now runs the U.S. Politics on Facebook official page, and Katie Harbath, who teaches Facebook best practices to elected officials, candidates and government offices. Both Noyes and Harbath work at Facebooks Washington, D.C. office. During the convention, Facebooks team is stationed at the Tampa Bay Convention Center, temporary home to thousands of journalists covering the event. Interestingly, Facebooks convention team is sharing a coworking space with Twitter. Tell us about what you do during an average day at Facebook D.C. Harbath: I work with various campaigns, presidential committees, congressional races and government agencies, like the CIA and the Secretary of State. Its a lot of answering questions, letting them know about new features and brainstorming new content. We work with folks to get them to realize things like if you export the insights dashboard, you get everything thats in the API. We help them judge success. Noyes: Im Facebooks spokesman in Washington and work on public policy and political coverage. I also curate content for the U.S. Politics on Facebook page as well as other pages we manage like the Government on Facebook page and Congress on Facebook page. Whats different for politics on Facebook in 2012 compared to 2008?

Noyes: Its different than four years ago because we dont have to explain to a politician what Facebook is anymore. Theyre already there, they just want to know how to do it better. Were helping them optimize their Facebook experience, which is part of what were doing here in Tampa and next week in Charlotte (at the Democratic National Convention). What are your specific roles for Facebook during the convention? Harbath: Im the master of things Facebook at the convention. Logistics and working to make sure our photo spots get set up while still doing my day to day job. Many *Republican politicians+ have been reaching out, asking for ideas about what to post to Facebook during the convention. A lot of electeds are doing behind-the scenes-photos, Scott Walker and Cathy McMorris Rodgers posted pictures of the sound check inside the Forum. Noyes: Im running the U.S. Politics on Facebook page, grabbing photos and videos (from politicians) to highlight on our page and posting announcements like the I Voted app. What are you most excited about during the conventions? Harbath: For me its getting to see all these people Ive worked with for years. My first job in politics was in 2003. Its an awesome opportunity to see a lot of friends and work with people that are usually so spread out brought together for one cool event. Noyes: Four years ago I was covering the convention, now Im here in very different role. Its been different. Ive been on deadline, but on a very different basis. Its equally exhausting maybe more so. Politico: Social media staged at conventions? http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/80319.html Steve Friess August 28, 2012 TAMPA, Fla. The omnipresence of Facebook, Google, FourSquare and other social media at the GOP convention is billed as a way Americans can interact with pols from afar but some say its now just part of the political theater. Paul Ryans Facebook campaign page featured a posting Tuesday of a video titled The Cheesehead Revolution has hit Tampa! And at nearly the same time Mitt Romney was being nominated from the floor, the GOP presidential and vice presidential candidates both tweeted, If you have a business and you started it, you did build it. And you deserve credit for that. Even the purveyors of the major social media outlets acknowledge that the seemingly altruistic goal to use social media to connect the public to its leaders can be manipulated just like many of the other tools of modern politics, from TV debates to attack ads. More and more politicians are getting more used to being careful in terms of what they say and what their post is to make sure they think through it just like anybody has to think through what they say when theyre in a public setting representing their company, said Katie Harbath, who leads Facebooks Republican outreach. Whats changed, especially at this Republican National Convention, is the definition of public. The GOP has touted the Convention without walls meme in countless press releases and media accounts, but perhaps Convention without backstages might be more appropriate.

We are under constant pressure to tweet, to tell everyone what were doing, said a Republican House candidate from Florida who didnt want to be named. Everywhere we are, were on. Its exhausting. But of course I check what Im saying, how I look, anywhere that someone might be watching me. Consider the Conversation Room that Google has built backstage for convention speakers to relax in: Its actual purpose, Google spokeswoman Samantha Smith admitted, is to encourage them to tweet, post to Facebook and jump into a soundproof booth where they can engage with constituents or fans back home via a Google+ hangout. Also, FourSquare started a special convention relationship with Time Magazine in which Time helps the app let users know the location of prominent people. The idea is to create a sense of intimacy. The result, though, is a constant state of playing politician and evercarefully scripting what the public can see. Certainly, people and voters and activists are expecting an incredible amount of transparency at events like this and from the candidates, said Vincent Harris, a prominent GOP digital strategist. It almost borders on voyeurism. Its almost like were heading towards a place where everything is constantly streaming. Twitter spokesman Adam Sharp said thats a tradeoff for something important, a closer connection between politicians and their constituents. Is it going to be like you went over to their house for dinner? No, Sharp said. But its definitely a move in the right direction." Harbath, too, believes the good outweighs the bad. Its more real because you have candidates now posting and saying things on their pages like normal human beings, she said. When Sen. *John+ Cornyn earlier this year posted hes going to Costco and he always hates how he ends up buying things he didnt intend to buy, that was real. And Harris rejected the notion that social media sells a false bill of goods. Is it a false sense of intimacy? No, because I dont know how much more intimate or real you can get than having a camera in the front of the stage and the back of the stage and following Romney up into his bus and being in his bus with him, Harris said. Some pols, though, can self-censor on social media when they have to. Wildcard Chris Christie created a new Twitter account just for followers of his keynote convention address Tuesday night. He did this so as not to confuse it with the tweets he reserves for New Jersey residents, including one from last week linked to a video called Why The Hell Would I Want To Leave? All of this is why Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), who isnt running for reelection, doesnt tweet. I believe in making considered statements, he said. And there are times I want to be alone. PC Magazine: Facebook and CNN team up to offer real-time election trending site http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2408981,00.asp Adario Strange August 28, 2012

In recent years, presidential elections have been accompanied by elaborate and increasingly high-tech presentations from television networks such as real-time viewer response metrics during debates, touch screen charts and graphs manipulated on giant in-studio displays, and 3D visualizations of national polls. But while TV magic and traditional polling still play an important part in tracking elections, social media promises to offer even greater real-time analytics of trending issues and regional tastes. A new partnership between Facebook, CNN, and Mass Relevance looks to bring that real-time data to your desktop with a project called Facebook-CNN Election Insights. The data visualization tool, which will also be used by CNN's on-air hosts, allows website visitors to view the attention a presidential or vice presidential candidate is receiving on Facebook by tracking how many people are mentioning that person. Not only does the tool work to present this data in real-time, but it also breaks down the data by gender, state, and time period. Commenting on the partnership, CNN Digital senior vice president K.C. Estenson said, "We are excited to build on our long relationship with Facebook to transform social media conversation into real-time data. By teaming up with Facebook and Mass Relevance, we can accurately gauge the buzz surrounding this election and deliver it to CNN Digital users, literally as it's happening." Mass Relevance, an Austin, Tex.-based company offering enterprise platforms for real-time social content curation, has also worked with companies like MTV, Pepsi, American Express, NBC Sports, Fox Sports, and the New York Times. For those with privacy concerns regarding the presidential trending information being drawn from your social media activity, according to Facebook the data is aggregate and anonymous. "Facebook is naturally a place where friends engage in political discourse, and we're pleased to announce that the Facebook-CNN Election Insights tool will offer an interactive, real-time glimpse into how and where this conversation is taking place across the country," said Elliot Schrage, vice president of public policy at Facebook. Just in time for the Republican National Convention currently being held in Florida, the site is live and already delivering a new kind of insight into the unfolding election field. Inside Facebook: Does Romney Have a Better Facebook Strategy than Obama? http://www.insidefacebook.com/2012/08/28/does-romney-have-a-better-facebook-strategy-than-obama/ Brittany Darwell August 28, 2012 Republican candidate Mitt Romney is leading President Barack Obama in Facebook engagement and new Likes, in part because of a strong social ad campaign that takes advantage of the latest opportunities on Facebook. Obama might have the most Facebook fans of any politician approaching 28 million but the average number of interactions per day on his page has not been much higher than on Romneys page, which passed 5 million Likes this weekend. There are likely several factors at play here. Larger pages routinely have a lower percentage of engaged users compared to pages with fewer Likes. New fans are more likely to see page posts than people who have Liked the page for a while, so Obama might not be reaching much of his audience as Romney currently is.

But beyond these inherent disadvantages, the Democratic campaign doesnt seem to be taking the right steps to maximize its impact on Facebook. Its posting less frequently and seems to be running fewer social ads. Romneys team, on the other hand, is using all the newest Facebook marketing and advertising features. In addition to posting more than four times per day on average, theyre running Sponsored Results so that Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan show up in the results when users search for Obama, Biden, Democrats, Republicans and other political pages. This is something that only became available last week. The Republican campaign is also running page post ads and Sponsored Stories, including in the News Feed. All these ads drive users to Romney and Pauls Facebook pages, leading to more new Likes and a higher People Talking About This count. Obamas campaign seems to have been only running traditional ads in the sidebar. This type of ad, which leads off-Facebook and does not have a Like button or social context, is known among social marketers as the worst performing unit on Facebook. Not only do these ads cost more and have lower average clickthrough rates than others on the social network, when users do notice and interact with them, there is no social amplification of this action. Users friends wont see that they Liked the page or engaged with a post because there are no calls to action from the ad to do these things. However, with Romneys social ads, each paid action can result in additional exposure. For example, users might see that their friends claimed an offer or shared a photo. And each new page Like opens up more of an audience to target with Sponsored Stories, which only appear to friends of fans. In 2008, many pointed to Obamas use of digital and social platforms as a key factor of his success. But Facebook moves fast, and his team doesnt seem to be as up to date as the Republicans are this time around. The campaign might be too reliant on organic activity, which as many marketers are discovering, isnt necessarily enough to succeed on Facebook anymore. Obamas team might also be weaker than Romneys on Facebook because it is putting more effort toward other channels like Twitter and YouTube. CNN: CNNs Social Media Guide to the Conventions http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/27/cnns-social-media-guide-to-the-conventions/ Lila King August 27, 2012 (CNN) The election of 2012 may well be the first truly social election in U.S. political history with voters' voices heard across the internet well before they enter the voting booth. As a result, the national conversation will play a bigger role than ever in the way news organizations such as CNN cover the story. With the kick off this week of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida and next week's Democratic National Convention, CNN presents its social take on the conventions. Consider the following guide an open invitation to participate in the way we cover the events of the next two weeks and the entire general election season to follow. Facebook This year, we're taking a very close look at what voters are saying by teaming up with Facebook for a few big projects: * The "I'm Voting" app invites you to declare that you're voting and share your position on the biggest election issues with CNN and your Facebook friends. Look for new questions off the news every few days until November.

* The Facebook-CNN "Election Insights" looks at the Facebook conversation around candidates by gender, age and location over time. * CNN's home for all things politics is the CNN Politics page on Facebook, where you'll see the latest data from our app, breaking news and conversation, and lists of CNN anchors whose scoops you can follow on Facebook. iReport CNN is sending three citizen journalists to each political convention - Alex Anderson, Elizabeth Lauten and Matt Sky to the RNC and Omekongo Dibinga, Melissa Fazli and Willie Harris to the DNC. They will be collecting sights and sounds from the convention floor and reactions to the speeches and events from the nation at home. Post your own iReports here for the RNC and here for the DNC. We'll be publishing the best from each convention into the multimedia gallery and interactive map layout we call Open Story. Twitter CNN is sending a small army of correspondents and reporters to each convention. Follow along with our boots-on-the-ground lists for the RNC (and DNC coming soon), and watch with us using the hashtag #cnnelections. Our main hub for all things politics will be @cnnpolitics, and @politicalticker will be the place to get every single one of the latest headlines the moment we have it. Live blog We invite you to watch the big events and speeches together with CNN's team of political experts and analysts, many of whom will be contributing to our live blog. All day long you'll find the very latest news developments and observations reported by our team at the Political Ticker, and then utilize it as a companion to CNN's live television coverage each night from 7 to 11 p.m. ET for extra information, trivia, social media reaction and more. You can join the conversation at cnn.com/ConventionsLive, or by tweeting with the hashtag #cnnelections. Instagram So much of the political conventions is pure theater visuals, messages, hats and that means an abundance of photo ops from behind the scenes. Many of the CNN shows and correspondents will post updates of their most photogenic moments on Instagram. Follow these accounts to see how the events come together behind the scenes: @cnnireport, @cnnpolitics, @cnnsitroom, @jimacostaCNN, @peterhambyCNN, @shepherdCNN, @laurambernardini, @johnkingCNN, @pierstonight, @andersoncooper and @cnnpr. GetGlue Use the GetGlue app to check in while you watch CNN's special television coverage of the 2012 conventions and unlock special GetGlue stickers. FourSquare On the ground in Tampa and Charlotte, CNN will be broadcasting live from the CNN Grill and serving up burgers to convention-goers (and the reporters who follow them). Check in on Foursquare for specials. Also, if you like CNN on Foursquare, you'll get tips from our producers and correspondents on good eats and political news around Tampa and Charlotte. CNN: Facebook, CNN Unveil Election Insights http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/27/facebook-cnn-unveil-election-insights/ August 27, 2012

MENLO PARK, Calif. & ATLANTA, Ga. CNN, Americas most trusted source of news and information for the 2012 presidential campaigns, and Facebook today unveiled the Facebook-CNN Election Insights. This tool displays the real-time number of people talking about President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his vice presidential pick Rep. Paul Ryan. Facebook-CNN Election Insights - found at CNN.com/FBinsights displays dynamic, real-time charts and visualizations using Facebook Insights to gauge the volume of Facebook activity surrounding the election and candidates. CNN will use the tool, which also allows people to view data by geography and demography, during their coverage of the presidential election. Working with social integration platform Mass Relevance, Facebook and CNN have created an experience that allows people to: View trends about how many people are talking about each of the candidates across the United States. Understand distinctions between who is talking about which candidates in those states male vs. female, and by age group. Contribute to the ongoing conversation via a Facebook Comments plug-in. Like the overall Election Insights, CNN Politics, Obama, Romney, Biden, and Ryan Facebook Pages Facebook-CNN Election Insights will be used during CNN broadcasts, including regular segments on CNNs The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer as well as in CNN.com and CNN Mobile campaign coverage. Notably, CNNs daily Political Gut Check newsletter and the U.S. Politics on Facebook Page will feature highlights from the tool. We are excited to build on our long relationship with Facebook to transform social media conversation into real-time data, said CNN Digital SVP KC Estenson. By teaming up with Facebook and Mass Relevance, we can effectively gauge the buzz surrounding this election and deliver it to CNN Digital users, literally as its happening. "Facebook is naturally a place where friends engage in political discourse, and were pleased to announce that the Facebook-CNN Election Insights tool will offer an interactive, real-time glimpse into how and where this conversation is taking place across the country," said Elliot Schrage, Vice President-Corporate Communications & Public Policy at Facebook. Todays launch builds on a previously announced multi-platform partnership between CNN and Facebook intended to bring an interactive and uniquely social experience to CNNs on-air, mobile and online audiences and Facebooks more than 160 million U.S. users. The Facebook-CNN Election Insights tool is powered by Facebook Insights and was designed and developed by Mass Relevance, a social integration firm that specializes in the curation and display of real-time social content. Earlier this summer, CNN and Facebook announced the joint creation of an I'm Voting application that enables people using Facebook to commit to voting, endorse specific candidates and positions, and see how their choices compare to what their friends are saying. Responses are visually displayed on an interactive map of the United States. The app, available in English and Spanish, was launched last week and can be found at Facebook.com/ImVoting.

Facebook-CNN Election Insights Methodology: Facebook-CNN Election Insights uses Facebook Page Insights and the metric People Talking About This (PTAT), supplemented with aggregate mentions, to gauge the volume of unique people talking about the candidates on Facebook each day. The data provided is aggregate and anonymous. The basic version of PTAT displayed on every Facebook Page is based on users likes (of a page, a page post, or other page content), comments, and tags over the last seven days. About Facebook: Launched in February 2004, Facebook is a social utility that gives people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. Facebook has connected more than 900 million people around the world and has played a role in encouraging civic and political engagement. Governments, lawmakers, and political campaigns around the world are using Facebook to communicate authentically with citizens in ways unimaginable a decade ago. About CNN: About CNN: CNN Worldwide, a division of Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., a Time Warner Company, is the most trusted source for news and information. For more than 5 consecutive years, CNN Digital has remained No. 1 in mobile news with an average of more than 21 million unique visitors per month. CNNs applications for iPhone, iPad, Nokia, Windows 7 phone, and Android phone & tablet have been downloaded more than 22 million times to date. With 3.7 million Facebook fans and nearly 6 million Twitter followers of @CNN, 8.5 million @CNNBRK followers, and more than 30 million followers across all network handles, CNN is the most followed news organization on social media and has more followers than any other cable brand. About Mass Relevance: Mass Relevance enables entertainment, media, retail, and manufacturing brands to drive real-time engagement through social curation and integration. The company provides a flexible, robust platform to facilitate audience and consumer interactions in a relevant, moderated way that is proven to deliver measurable results. The company serves more than 130 clients including the Big Four television networks, 7 of the top 10 2011 cable networks, as well as top brands like Ford, Target, Universal Pictures, MTV, Samsung, Patagonia, Pepsi, GE and Victoria's Secret. The company is privately held with venture capital funding. All Facebook: Facebook, Romneys Campaign Strategist Sound Off on Panel at GOP Convention http://allfacebook.com/national-journal-republican-convention-panel_b98302 Jennifer Moire August 27, 2012 Its all about engagement. That was the message from Katie Harbath, manager of policy for Facebook, in a briefing on social media and the 2012 campaign at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., Monday. The National Journal-sponsored panel, The Digital Campaign and the Impact of Social Media in 2012, featured heavy hitters in digital politics from Google and Twitter, as well as the digital strategist for Mitt Romneys campaign, Zac Moffatt. Moffatt said theres a big difference between metrics and engagement. In fact, the campaign has coined its own measurement terms that it calls vanity metrics and actionable metrics. While participants discussed the recent Pew research that examined the social media usage of both presidential contenders, Moffatt says it doesnt matter how many followers or likes you have if users arent engaging. To support his view, he added his own data point.

When the Supreme Court ruling on health care was handed down, the engagement rate on President Barack Obamas Facebook page was 1.5 percent, versus 27 percent on Romneys page. Thats how the Romney campaign defines success how many likes, shares, or comments a Facebook post generates. Harbath added that the biggest difference between this cycle and 2008 is having a candidate engaged across social platforms, which, in turn, gets a voter to the polls. The panel also mentioned the potential Facebook has for persuading and influencing more voters by giving instant credibility to a campaign post if its shared by a friend in your network. When compared with more traditional campaign tactics, such as door-knocking or phone banking, nothing has the scale and reach of Facebook, Moffatt added. Harbath said improved cell phone cameras and the emergence of Instagram and infographics are enabling users to share more behind-the-scenes images with their online community. Those types of visuals boost engagement more so than a straight text or status update. Continually building up engagement and giving quality posts that people find interesting or are talking about are key to stronger engagement, said Harbath. A recent example? When Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) was selected as the vice presidential nominee, his Facebook page exploded. Moderator Major Garrett of National Journal questioned whether social media really has the power to persuade, or whether it preaches to the choir? Facebook is all about sharing and engaging with validators, while Twitter is more about broadcasting to your followers, Moffatt said. While some messages wont last long, social tools allow a campaign to reignite an issue, seed a conversation around a topic,or let an issue come to the forefront. All of the channels working together extend a campaigns reach and thats really any campaigns goal. Readers: Are you following the RNC via Facebook this year? Ad Age: Romneys Digital Chief: Engagement Trumps Raw Numbers in Social Media http://adage.com/article/campaign-trail/romney-s-digital-chief-engagement-trumps-raw-numbers/236876/ Matthew Creamer, Ken Wheaton August 27, 2012 TAMPA, Fla. -- Mitt Romney has fewer Twitter followers than the first lady, to say nothing of the president he's trying to unseat. His Facebook following isn't even a fifth as large as President Obama's. But the digital director of the Romney campaign isn't worried. Speaking a day before the Republican National Convention kicks off in earnest, Zac Moffatt played down the social gap. He drew a distinction between "vanity metrics and actionable metrics," counting raw social media following stats as the former. Mr. Moffatt said he's more concerned with engagement and pointed to the candidate's Facebook page after the Supreme Court ruling on Obama's health-care plan. Following the ruling, Mr. Moffatt said that though Mr. Romney has far fewer Facebook fans, the rate of engagement was much higher, 27%, than the 1.5% that engaged on President Obama's page.

"If you're going to get elected what would you rather have," he asked an audience at a panel discussion put on by The Atlantic, National Journal and CBS News. "It doesn't matter how many people follow you if they're not engaged." Mr. Moffatt was in part reacting to a recent Pew study finding that President Obama "holds a distinct advantage over Mitt Romney in the way his campaign is using digital technology to communicate directly with voters." Pew found that the Obama campaign is posting nearly four times as much content and is using twice as many channels. Also on the panel were: Daniel Sieberg of Google Politics & Elections; Adam Sharp, head of government, news and social innovation at Twitter; and Katie Harbath, manager for policy, Facebook. (At times, the three seemed to be engaged in a competition to prove which social-media platform was more relevant to the political sphere.) After the convention, Mr. Moffatt said he expected the Romney social following to increase "exponentially." He added that social wasn't as good at helping drum up fundraising as email is. It looks like Mr. Romney has already gotten a social bounce as the convention neared. Since Ad Age published an infographic comparing the candidates' social prowess a week ago, Mr. Romney has added about 1 million Facebook likes, bringing him to 5.1 million, an increase of about 25%. His growth on Twitter was about 8%, to 920,000. During the same period, President Obama also added about 1 million Facebook likes (about 3% growth) and about 400,000 Twitter followers (about 2% growth). Those much slower growth rates come on much larger bases. To Mr. Moffatt's point about engagement, more people are talking about Mr. Romney's page currently, about 1.7 million, than President Obama's 1.5 million. But that of course is aided by the fact the news cycle is currently consumed by the Republican convention. You can see how Facebook and Twitter are tracking the political conversation here and here. It's worth noting that none of these numbers indicates an intent to vote for either candidate in a half-dozen or so swing states, which is, essentially, the only thing that matters. Nor do they show how close the race is based on the latest polling data, which basically put the candidates in a dead heat. Mr. Moffatt offered a peek inside the Romney campaign's digital efforts. The digital team now consists of more than 110 people. He said that Mr. Romney has written his own tweets in the past, but now is more likely to send along an email with a photo that his team can tweet. "We couldn't talk to Mitt 27 times a day about what he wants to say on Twitter. He'll eventually stop responding to us." Mr. Moffatt said that in Florida and Ohio, both crucial swing states that will help decide the election, about one-third of the electorates are "off the grid," meaning that they're only watching live TV when they're watching sports. This reduces the effectiveness of traditional TV advertising and makes digital efforts all the more important. Mr. Moffatt said that though this dynamic is understood at the national level, "it hasn't permeated down to the lower races, where they're asking 'How do I buy enough TV to reach everyone.'"

Looking ahead to the convention content, which will kick off tomorrow, Mr. Moffatt said YouTube will replace the role of the convention site, with the Google-owned video site broadcasting speeches and integrating social media. "The entire convention will live through the YouTube channel," he said.

The Hill: GOP, Dem Conventions Battle to Claim Social Media Supremacy http://thehill.com/conventions-2012/gop-convention-tampa/245331-republican-democratic-conventionsbattle-to-claim-social-media-supremacy Alicia Cohn and Julie Ershadi August 27, 2012 Social media is taking over both political conventions this year, and Democrats and Republicans are battling to prove which party can best take advantage of the new technologies. Organizers deny that they are competing against each other, but between press-release descriptions of strikingly similar digital strategies and clear competition on the same eight social platforms, it is obvious neither wants to be left behind. Were not worried about what the Democrats are doing. Our plan here is a great plan, said James Davis, communications director for the Republican National Convention. Nikki Sutton, digital-media director for the Democratic National Convention, was just as confident in her teams strategy. Its always nice to know what the other side is doing, but we dont take that into consideration in our plans. Democratic organizers are calling their convention the most open and accessible convention in history while the GOP is calling its the convention without walls. Both have a stated goal of opening up convention events to anyone, anywhere, so long as they have an Internet connection. Both conventions will live-stream all events through Google and encourage real-time tweeting by attendees through high-speed Wi-Fi access. AT&T has invested nearly $625 million in permanent upgrades to the Charlotte area and $140 million in Tampa Bay. According to Davis, new network infrastructure capabilities at the GOP convention can handle sending 37.5 million tweets per second. The official GOP hashtag is #GOP2012; the Democratic hashtag is #DNC2012. This is really the first convention in a really mature social-media era, social-networking era, Davis said. We know the [social-media+ conversations going to happen; we want to be part of that conversation. The conventions have a presence on just about every social platform out there, including Instagram, Pinterest and Flickr, and both started blogging early about preparations. Its important for us to meet people where they are, Sutton said. Everybody has a different way of getting their news and sharing it with their friends and family.

The parties are scrambling for both online interest and engagement. The Republicans currently have wider audiences on Google Plus, YouTube and Twitter, but nearly twice as many people have actually viewed the Democrats YouTube videos and three times as many have hit the Like button on the Democratic National Conventions Facebook page. While organizers wont name one digital tool they are emphasizing more than others, the help of Google and Skype indicates they are throwing their resources behind video. The Republican National Convention features a digital green room located near the stage in the building where Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan will accept the GOP nomination. When speakers leave the stage, they can use this room to tweet, update their Facebook page or conduct a Skype interview. Its one way of really taking what you see from the broadcast and immediately putting it in the online sphere, Davis said. Its an opportunity for speakers to drive conversations with people outside of campus so they can experience the convention just the way they are. The conventions are also an opportunity for the social networks to take over a spotlight that has dimmed through lower viewer interest in traditional media coverage. The Wall Street Journal noted last week that Nielsen ratings for broadcast convention coverage have plummeted since 1980. Google spokeswoman Samantha Smith said the goal at both conventions is to connect candidates with voters where they are, which is online. Even when theyre watching the conventions *on TV+, theyre usually doing so with their mobile device in their hand or their laptop within reach, she said. Its their opportunity to showcase Google Plus, a platform that has arguably become more popular with politicians than it is with average users. The platform did not even exist during the last presidential cycle, but this year it will host convention-themed Google Hangouts, video chats with speakers, delegates, reporters and anyone else who stops by Googles physical display areas at either convention. Google-owned YouTube will serve as the focal point for online activity for the GOP convention, organizers said, and Smith confirmed that YouTube experts will be present to assist with the technical production of the live stream. The benefits for Google include the opportunity to host a daylong dialogue with Bloomberg at both conventions on the Internet and free expression online, two topics that prompted their share of controversial legislation this year. All lawmakers are welcome to attend. Mobile apps for each convention also aim to help attendees actually present at the conventions keep track of schedules and navigate local events using geo-social tools such as Foursquare. Facebook is also setting up Photo Spots at both conventions where attendees can upload photos instantly to their timelines.

The Hill: Romney Digital Director: User Engagement on Social Media Trumps Quantity of Followers http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/245625-romney-digital-director-user-engagement-onsocial-media-trumps-quantity-of-followers Jennifer Martinez August 27, 2012 The success of a campaign's social-media effort should be measured by user engagement with its digital content rather than the number of followers a candidate has, the digital director of Mitt Romney's presidential campaign argued on Monday. Zac Moffatt, who heads up the digital shop for the Romney campaign, credited user engagement on socialmedia platforms like Facebook and Twitter with helping push President Obama's "you didn't build that" line to the forefront of the national political conversation. Moffatt said Obama made the remark on a Friday, but it didn't get much attention until the following Monday. "Social allows things to reignite and some things to come to the forefront," Moffatt said during a panel hosted by National Journal and The Atlantic at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Tampa, Fla. Moffatt took issue with the findings of a recent study published by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism that said Obama's reelection team was leading the Romney campaign in socialmedia activity. He argued that measuring how many people are talking or sharing a campaign's digital content with their friends on social media is a more accurate metric than the number of followers a candidate has or the quantity of digital content a campaign publishes. Representatives from Facebook, Twitter and Google also echoed that message. Adam Sharp, senior manager for Twitter's government and news team, illustrated that point by noting that the famous picture of the US Airways plane landing on the Hudson River was tweeted by a Twitter user with just 33 followers. "Follower count is not the driving metric for campaigns or for anyone," Sharp said. "Sharing is a powerful sentiment. You're in a sense becoming a broadcaster," said Daniel Sieberg, a spokesman for Google's Politics and Elections team. "That's an amazing opportunity for people to have in this election cycle no matter what tool they're using." Social media platforms are also powerful tools for persuasion during elections. Katie Harbath, a public policy manager at Facebook, said Facebook users are 57 percent more likely to get friends out to vote. While building engagement on social media is one concern for campaigns, another is how to reach out to the growing number of Americans that don't watch live TV. Moffatt said roughly one-third of the American electorate are considered "off the grid" and do not watch live TV other than sporting events. For example, he noted that his mother records the ABC comedy "Modern Family" rather than watching it live on prime-time TV, and that she fast forwards through the commercials during the sitcom. "As a result, you're always going to have to look for new ways to get into people's stream of

[consciousness]," Moffat said. "If you don't try to have conversations on these [social media] platforms, you will miss these people." One way to reach out to these voters is through online advertising, an area the Romney campaign has invested in, according to Moffatt. Another is by sharing online video, which is viral in nature and therefore has a large reach. The Republican Party has dubbed the 2012 Republican convention as "the convention without walls." The representatives for Twitter, Google and Facebook noted that this is the first time Americans at home will be able to view the convention through the perspective of the delegates and people on the ground in Tampa. "Everyone has a phone now where you can take some really good pictures," Harbath said. "It's giving you a behind the scenes experience that's not the campaign." Google will be streaming the convention live on YouTube. There will also be Google+ hangouts where people at home can participate in the convention events via their mobile devices. The Hill: Facebook, Twitter Provide Real-Time Insight From Political Conventions http://thehill.com/blogs/twitter-room/other-news/245643-facebook-twitter-provide-real-time-insight-frompolitical-conventionsAlicia Cohn August 27, 2012 The social networks want to make sure that this year, when the political conventions are just a click away, so are online conversations surrounding them. CNN on Monday unveiled a new social analysis tool powered by Facebook data. The new tool provides access to aggregate, anonymous data to gauge the number of unique people talking about the candidates on Facebook each day, the social network said. The Facebook-CNN Election Insights tool measures how many people are mentioning presidential candidates on Facebook, with the ability to break that tally down by state, gender, age and time range. The tool provides raw trend data but cannot show whether the ongoing conversations are mostly positive or negative. The Facebook data can provide a few anecdotal insights, such as the fact that among women ages 18- to 24-years-old, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has been prompting 6 percent more conversation than the previous day for the past seven days. Nationwide, Facebook conversations about President Obama, Vice President Biden and Ryan all decreased over the past week, according to Facebook, while conversation about Mitt Romney increased, likely due to the GOP convention starting Monday in Tampa, Fla. Twitter is also monitoring how much conversation the convention prompts on its website. According to a tweet from the Government & Politics team, "before even starting, there were more tweets about the convention [Sunday] alone than the entire week in 2008." Twitter noted that the use of Twitter to talk politics has grown exponentially this presidential cycle compared to the last. Twitter's user base has grown a great deal in those four years, as well, and many of those new users are more interested in politics. Obama's 2012 State of the Union address generated more than 766,000

tweets. The 2008 political conventions generated fewer tweets than just the first half of that speech, Twitter said. Both GOP and Democratic convention organizers are looking to harness some of that interest, emphasizing social media and digital access in convention plans. The official GOP hashtag is #GOP2012; the Democratic hashtag is #DNC2012. The #GOP2012 hashtag is being heavily promoted along with the official logo at this week's GOP convention. Facebook also plans to curate what convention participants are saying publicly on Facebook about their convention experience. Representatives from both Facebook and Twitter are on the ground at the conventions to help encourage use by attendees. CNN: On Facebook, Campaigns Show the Power of a Post http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/27/on-facebook-campaigns-show-the-power-of-a-post/ Eric Weisbrod August 27, 2012 (CNN) - With half the United States sharing what theyre doing, their photos and their opinions on Facebook, whats being talked about on the site is a telling way of taking the nations political pulse. CNN has teamed up with Facebook on a new resource that looks into how much the presidential and vice presidential candidates are being buzzed about. The Facebook-CNN Election Insights measures and compares how many people are using the site to talk about President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney and his running mate Rep. Paul Ryan. The results show the power of the campaigns on Facebook and also reveal how the conversation changes depending the time, age, gender or location. Both campaigns have made Facebook a part of their strategy and use it to drive buzz for their candidates. Obamas campaign-run fan page has 27 million fans, while Romneys page has more than 5 million. Ryans page has 1.8 million, and Biden falls fourth with 367,000 Facebook fans. Because of the large number of fans amassed by each candidate, each campaign has the ability to drive election chatter with just one post. For example, the insights reveal a giant spike for Obama around noon ET last Saturday, the same time his campaign posted a photo of the Obama family with a sentimental message from the president about his two daughters Sasha and Malia. Im inspired by my own children, how full they make my heart, the post says, They make me work to make the world a little bit better. And they make me want to be a better man. Within two days, this post drew in more than 400,000 likes, more than 33,000 shares and nearly 20,000 comments. Romney drew in even more buzz last Tuesday evening with a post asking for likes to help the page reach five million fans. It had a clear impact, as nearly 700,000 people liked the post and the campaign followed up on Friday announcing it had surpassed the milestone.

 Follow CNN Politics on Facebook With such a diverse demographic on Facebook, not all mentions come from the same people. Each candidate has groups that buzz more about them than others. When Facebook mentions are broken down by age, the statewide heat map highlights a clear skew of younger people talking about Obama and older Americans discussing Romney. The majority of 18-24 year olds mention Obama more than Romney in every single state except Idaho, Wyoming, West Virginia and Utah. Likewise, people older than 55 are discussing Romney more in every state except Vermont and Hawaii, the state in which Obama was raised. The age breakdown bar-chart also highlights the power of those who are 55 and older, as they are mentioning the candidates and interacting with their fan pages more than any other age group. A gender gap is also apparent between the candidates: Among men, Romney is being mentioned more than Obama in every state except New York, Vermont and Hawaii. Among women, the chatter is much more split, with Obama getting more of mentions in the Northeast, West, and much of the Midwest. The chatter is based on daily unique mentions, which is the number of people who either include a post or interact with that candidates fan page at least once a day. This includes all conversation both positive and negative. The tool also shows if a candidate is gaining or losing momentum by displaying a percentage of how much each candidates buzz changed from 24 hours before. "Facebook is naturally a place where friends engage in political discourse, says Elliot Schrage, vice presidentcorporate communications & public policy at Facebook, The Facebook-CNN Election Insights tool will offer an interactive, real-time glimpse into how and where this conversation is taking place across the country. The number of people on Facebook is staggering and still rapidly growing. There are more people on Facebook than there were total voters in 2008, a year of record turnout. Four years ago, Facebook averaged 100 million active users worldwide. Today, that number is rapidly approaching 1 billion. As the conversation continues on Facebook, you can take a closer look at the conversation using FacebookCNN Election Insights interactive dashboard at CNN.com/FacebookInsights and keep an eye on the trends. Terra: How Social Media is Changing the Way Politicians Gather Information http://news.terra.com/how-social-media-is-changing-the-way-politicians-gatherinformation,6797917f52c59310VgnVCM10000098cceb0aRCRD.html Bruce Schoenfeld August 25, 2012 In an open-plan office in Durham, N.C., that feels part ad agency and part rec room, a 31-year-old EvoApp executive named Pritam Das sits rummaging through all the Twitter posts that have mentioned Mitt Romney in the previous 24 hours, sifting and sorting by various keywords and metrics. The day before, a senior Romney advisor had likened the campaign's transition from the primary fight to the general election to shaking an Etch A Sketch. With the stroke of a key, Das reveals that of the tweets mentioning Romney, the word "Etch" ranked third among tags, behind only the candidate's first and last name. More tellingly, perhaps, Das was able to gauge that many of those judging the impact on Romney's

campaign most harshly had the greatest influence in the Twittersphere--not just the most followers, but followers who in turn have influence of their own. "These guys have come up with a way to understand and interpret unstructured data in real time," says EvoApp CEO Kip Frey of founders Joe Davy and Alexey Melnichenko, 23-year-olds who met at a specialty math-and-science high school and abandoned college careers to start the company. "Politics is only one of its uses, but it's an important one. It shows that we can solve difficult problems." EvoApp, which has landed $2.9 million in angel investment, expects to gross nearly $1 million in 2012, its first year in business. It's part of a new wave of polling and data firms that are changing the way political campaigns gather and interpret information. Many launched after the 2008 presidential election, during which the Obama team made revolutionary use of the internet to solicit donations and communicate with supporters. That was just four years ago--a short time in traditional political strategizing, but a generation to today's pollsters. "The stuff we used to do even two and three years ago, we don't do anymore," says Mike Henry, a veteran Democratic political operative who is running Tim Kaine's Virginia Senate campaign. "It's dated. It's not accurate. Politics drives people to adapt, or they lose. That helps move things along." Adapt or lose. That's what Newt Gingrich realized after he started his campaign for president in mid-2011. His staff was reacting to issues on a 24-hour news cycle, which was the way politics worked the last time he'd run for office, in the 1990s. The strategy proved disastrous in a world in which even waiting for a debate to finish before responding to it means you've already waited too long. Witness the $10,000 bet Romney proposed to Texas Gov. Rick Perry on national television, a moment that helped pull even old-school pols into the Twitter era. "All of a sudden, within minutes, there was a '#10Kbet' Twitter hashtag. The debate hadn't even ended yet," says Rebecca Katz, a partner at Washington, D.C.-based consultants Hilltop Public Solutions. "If you wanted to know how a certain issue was playing, it typically took you three to four days, and even that was extremely fast-track," says Zac McCrary, vice president of Anzalone Liszt Research, a technologysavvy Democratic polling firm. "Now you can do it in a matter of hours. That can change the trajectory of a campaign." The pressure to win is far more intense in the 50-percent-plus-one-vote world of politics than in ordinary commerce. In nearly every consumer category, a customer base can be built up incrementally over years, and a product with a small market share can still be extremely profitable. Not so in politics. If you win the election or the referendum, it doesn't matter by how much. If you lose, it doesn't matter how fervently your supporters loved you. In politics, even the smallest advantage can mean the difference. So anyone who can identify voter sentiment or political trends faster or more accurately than the rest of the world will be in great demand. "The information game is rapidly changing," says Jeffrey Plaut, a founding partner of New York-based Global Strategy Group, a strategic communications and research firm that works with companies and candidates. "And politics is acutely tied to how people get and process information." Eli Kaplan is founder of Rising Tide Interactive, a D.C. firm that uses digital media for fundraising, information-gathering and showing ads. "We've reached a tipping point where the people who run

campaigns understand that they really need to take this stuff seriously," he says. "There's still room for traditional polling and advertising. But it has become clear that if all you're doing are things the way you always did, you're doomed." Some of the new players in the category are political insiders. Others are not, like EvoApp's Davy and Melnichenko, who are far more comfortable with programming than with public policy. "We're 23 years old," Davy says, "and our intelligence manages some of the most secret and important projects in the world. When you think about that, it's crazy." EvoApp pulls in data from throughout the internet--Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums, news stories--and gives it structure. "Politics was one of the most obvious uses because it's all about information," Davy says. EvoApp's tools analyze conversations and can provide insight into sentiment around a candidate in real time-sometimes a week earlier than Gallup poll results. It's this promise of incremental insight through innovative methodologies that is leading the charge. "I see new vendors come in all the time who've never even been involved in politics but think they have the next great idea," says Katie Harbath, a former Republican National Committee (RNC) staffer who is now the manager of public policy for Facebook. "The thing is, some of them actually do." Opportunities abound. "There's a pot of money to be had in politics for people who understand this emerging world," says Patrick Ruffini, the former eCampaign director of the RNC. "These new firms are looking to bank on the shift from the traditional to the digital." In 2007 Ruffini founded Engage, a Republican consulting company based on the idea that the next generation of political data-collection and advertising would be wholly different from the last one. "Before us, there were a lot of firms that built websites and billed themselves as digital strategists," he says. "We distinguish ourselves by showing how to use digital to actually win elections." Even established names are getting into the act. In the 1980s, Jill Hanauer appeared in Time magazine and on the CBS morning news talking up the student movement. Later, she worked for Gary Hart, Patrick Leahy, Michael Dukakis and Barbara Boxer, among others. In 1994, she founded the Interfaith Alliance to protect America's church-and-state separation.Informing the nation: Project New America's Jill Hanauer.Photo Matt Nager After helping Colorado's Democrats take back the legislature in 2004 even as John Kerry was getting trounced in the state's presidential race, she realized that Eastern political operatives didn't understand the West. "We were winning races on the local level that Democrats never would have won before," she says. "We wanted to figure out why." That led to Denver-based Project New West, a research and strategy firm founded with former Clinton political director Doug Sosnik. Instead of working for candidates like a traditional pollster, Project New West hired pollsters itself in an effort to gather detailed demographic and attitudinal data. Then it analyzed and integrated the data using stringent metrics of analysis and sold the resulting information to state party organizations and other entities through annual subscriptions of up to $140,000 each. "It's a unique business model that allows millions of dollars of research to be shared with our subscribers," Hanauer says. The model worked so well that the company has relaunched as Project New America (PNA) and started operating nationwide. "We don't describe ourselves as a polling firm," Hanauer says. "Polling only gives you

one snapshot of a deeper, richer picture that you need. We pay various pollsters to do work on an issue or in a region--not one data point but many, and over time."Meet and greet: Jill Hanauer at a 2009 Project New West Summit with Robert Redford (far left).Photo Tony Gallagher From a staff of two, PNA has ramped up to 16 full-timers and expects to gross $5 million this year. Next comes a private offering that will raise $1 million in investment capital. "Our secret is, we're not competing with pollsters," Hanauer says. "We're adding value to the work they do. Because of our information, campaigns can micro-target in a way that hasn't been done before." Some 15 blocks away from PNA headquarters, amid the sports bars and trendy restaurants of downtown Denver, campaign data is being collected using even less traditional means. Scott McNealy, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a political enthusiast with strong Republican ties, created Wayin, an internet polling and survey tool that works with sports, consumer brands--and politics. "This is a fun business, immediately engaging and psychotically addictive," he says. "And people are responding. We've just had our first quarter of revenue, and the results are pretty exciting." Both the Romney and Gingrich campaigns signed on early; the RNC is also a user. Wayin polling is not anonymous (an e-mail address must be provided), so clients are able to aggregate data about users--not only making every answer more meaningful, but also letting sponsors target their followups. It's the secret weapon to a tool that has enticed interest and investment from some heavy hitters. "I've been able to go to all kinds of buddies, and they're all invested in it," McNealy says. "We have a list of investors that's about as sterling as you can have. And my board of directors is a Fortune 200-caliber board."Poll vault: The Wayin team at work.Photo courtesy of Wayin Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist and commentator, periodically references an ongoing Wayin poll on his Fox News appearances. Then he sits back and watches the responses add up. "Thanks to Wayin, you ask a question on Monday morning and you get an answer on Monday morning," says Luntz, who has invested in the tool. "It allows you to break down an issue to the finest, cleanest demographics and geographics of any technology I've seen. Is it the wave of the future? I don't know, and I don't really care. It's tremendously exciting to me right now." For many campaigns, the idea of hiring a firm solely to handle digital media or internet polling remains an expensive novelty. But at some point soon, many industry professionals believe, it will become a necessity, just as hiring a pollster in addition to a campaign manager became de rigueur for national campaigns during the 1960s. "Social media gives us an additional data point," says campaign manager Henry. "Smart campaigns acknowledge that, and use it to their advantage."Bridging tradition and technology: John Anzalone of Anzalone Liszt Research.Photo Kim Fisher Despite this, says John Anzalone, founder of Anzalone Liszt Research, "I still find a lot of political people have their heads in the sand." His Montgomery, Ala.-based polling firm is considered traditional in that it actively calls people and asks them questions. But over the years, his methodology has evolved radically. It's not so much about keeping pace with the competition, he insists, as serving clients by giving them the most accurate information possible. "The Anzalone model is the future," Henry says. "Taking both disciplines, the old way and the new way, and bringing them together."

The son of a long-haul trucker, Anzalone managed early in his career to intersect with most of the top Democratic operatives of the generation, including James Carville, Paul Begala and David Wilhelm, who managed Clinton's presidential run. So when he decided to set up shop as a pollster, he had the contacts. Five years later he added Jeff Liszt, former technology director for the Alabama Democratic Party, as a research director and eventually made him a partner. These days, Anzalone is one of the most respected information-gatherers in the business. In 2008, he worked seven states for the Obama campaign, including Florida, North Carolina and Virginia; this year, he added Arizona and Nevada. Anzalone will bill at least $5 million in 2012 from 60 clients. "It's great that we poll for Obama, but we're also running a poll for the mayor of Elizabeth, N.J. It's repeat business like that that pays our bills," he says. Recently, Anzalone sat in his office on a conference call about a poll he's conducting for sponsors of a California ballot initiative. The office looked almost the same as it had when he'd handled Obama's polling four years before. But in 2008, almost no polling firms in America were calling cell phones. It's far more expensive than calling land lines, since federal law prohibits calls to mobile phones using recorded messages or automatic dialing software. Yet because he's convinced it yields more accurate readings, Anzalone now targets cell phones for up to one-fifth of his responses. He also uses innovative messaging polls on the internet that yield exponentially more data than anything he can do on the phone. "It's 40,000 data points instead of 1,000," he reports. "You're testing 16 different messages in boxes of four. And you can amalgamate the information in a way that you never could." That's just the start of the next great information revolution, he believes. "People coming out of this campaign will start businesses around analyzing data, bringing all the strands together in ways that haven't been done before in politics," he says. Some of that methodology will be cribbed from the corporate sector, which is several iterations ahead of political campaigns when it comes to testing advertising and branding messages online. "Most corporate strategic research is now done digitally using rapidly developing tools," says Global Strategy Group's Plaut. "There's the ability to get immediate feedback, to change things based on consumers' attitudes." Companies such as his that can engineer a successful crossover have a unique product to pitch to campaign managers. "We're seeing increasingly that the political and corporate work feed on and inform each other," he adds. Campaigns aren't the only ones doing the testing. On Fox Radio one April morning, conservative strategist Luntz and commentator Sean Hannity fell into a discussion about which issues mean the most to GOP voters. They decided to create an instant poll on Wayin.com and asked listeners to ... well, weigh in. Sarah Uhran, Wayin's director of unusual projects, sat in a small conference room back in Denver tallying results on her cell phone. The poll had no connection with any campaign or political party. It was for entertainment purposes only; a media personality and a consultant asking a question, and their listeners responding. But since many of those who voted were frequent visitors to the site and had logged in so their views could be recorded, Uhran was able to "slice and dice" the votes in a variety of ways, aggregating their opinions with views they'd expressed in the past. "That's the part that Stephen Colbert was so interested in when we sat down with him," Uhran says. "That if you have this data, eventually you can say that people who like Obama, for example, also tend toward these other attributes that you can list."

The Luntz/Hannity poll generated thousands of responses. "Whenever Frank [Luntz] does a poll with us, we always get at least 2,000 votes, and sometimes as many as 30,000," Uhran notes--numbers that far exceed the 1,000 or so that most traditional pollsters use to create a snapshot of current opinion. These were Hannity listeners, so they hardly represented a cross section of the American public. They hadn't been screened for gender, ethnicity, geography or anything else. Still, it was hard not to be intrigued that, say, only 3 percent of these hard-core Republicans blame Bush for the economic crunch. "Wait, that number is now down to 1 percent," Uhran points out, peering at her phone. "It may not be scientific," she acknowledges. "But it is interesting."

FOX (Tampa Bay): In One Room, Social Media Titans Gather for RNC http://www.myfoxtampabay.com/story/19373344/2012/08/24/in-one-room-social-media-titans-gather-forrnc Jeremy Campbell August 24, 2012 TAMPA (FOX 13) It may feel like the internet been around forever, but more people are online this election than ever before so many more that every tweet made on Election Day 2008 would go by in about six minutes at the rate we read them today. Tampa is prepped to get in on the conversation. "There's going to be a huge team here at the convention who is going to be strictly focused on what the conversation is that's happening online," said Jonathan Torres of Social Media Club Tampa Bay. Twitter and Facebook know this. It's one reason they've joined forces, titans of social media together in one workspace in Tampa. "This isn't the dating game. You don't have to pick between the two of us. The best campaigns are using us, Twitter, Google, all for our strengths and integrating us all together," said Katie Harbath of Facebook. They'll all take the stage on Saturday, along with Yelp, at Democracy 2.0. It's a convention in its own right, on the impact of social media. "I don't even know if these people from different platforms have been in the same room before, yet alone spoken on the same panel," said Adonai Communications' Robin Vosler. It's a public event at Relevant Church in Tampa beginning at 5 p.m. It's designed to help you take part in the online conversation. "We really hope that other places around the country and even internationally will see Tampa as a viable social media town and city where people do make a living in social media," Vosler said. For more information, visit http://democracy2-0.eventbrite.com.

Bloomberg Businessweek: Univision plans presidential forum with Obama, Romney http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-08-23/univision-plans-presidential-forum-with-obama-romney Andy Fixmer August 24, 2012 Univision Communications Inc., the biggest U.S. Spanish-language broadcaster, will host Meet the Candidate forums, with separate events for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, after being shut out of the presidential debates. The candidates will take questions from an audience, moderators and Facebook Inc. users, the New Yorkbased company said yesterday in an e-mail. The network will translate questions and answers for the candidates and the viewers. The schedule will be announced later. Obama and Romney agreed to participate after Univision Chief Executive Officer Randy Falco released an Aug. 15 letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates protesting rejection of its news anchors to be among this years moderators. These events speak to President Obama and Governor Romney recognizing the important role Hispanic America will play in the elections and in defining the future of our country, Univision News President Isaac Lee said in the statement. The two forums, in partnership with Facebook (FB), will be hosted by Univision News anchors Jorge Ramos and Maria Elena Salinas, closely held Univision said. Univision was acquired in 2007 for $12.6 billion by Saban Capital Group Inc., Madison Dearborn Partners LLC, Providence Equity Partners Inc., TPG Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners LP. PBSs Jim Lehrer, CNNs Candy Crowley and CBSs Bob Schieffer will each host a presidential debate, according to the website for the Commission on Presidential Debates. Martha Raddatz of ABC will moderate a debate between the vice presidential candidates. Red Alert Politics: Advice for First Time RNC Convention Attendees http://redalertpolitics.com/2012/08/23/advice-for-first-time-rnc-convention-attendees/ Eric Wilson August 23, 2012 An estimated 50,000 politicians, delegates, operatives, volunteers, and members of the media are preparing to make the trek to Tampa, FL for the 2012 Republican National Convention. For a first-timer, like myself, the whole thing can seem a daunting experience, so I turned to some convention veterans for advice on surviving the GOPs big week. Before You Arrive Preparation is key. Katie Harbath, Manager of Public Policy at Facebook, suggests that attendees start asking around now about what events are happening and what contacts of yours have tickets. Go down to Tampa with a few tickets ahead of time, but also be asking around once you get down there. Rest up this weekend, warns the Young Guns Action Funds Brad Dayspring because you are not going to get much sleep between Monday and Friday nor will you want to once you are there.

Mindy Finn, of Twitter and a veteran of the 2004 and 2008 conventions, advises first-timers to travel light pack your phone and/or tablet in your bag when you head out for the day, leave your computer at the hotel. Speaking of Twitter, Dayspring (@BDayspring) recommends building out a convention Twitter list before you arrive. The list should be made up of journalists, staffers, Members, politicos, and VIPs. Youll be able to quickly find out where the cool kids are, where the fun is, and where the unexpectedly fun events are happening. Once Youre There Flexibility will get you far in Tampa. Kristen Soltis, Vice President at the Winston Group, recalls that for her, the most exciting things that happened at the convention were totally by chance. According to Finn, You can only plan so much from afar. Details for, and invites to, events will materialize once you are on the ground. Chance meetings will be more frequent than plans to rendezvous for networking purposes. Theres a lot going, but pace yourself, advises Harbath. Dont forget to eat, drink plenty of water and dont try to make it to everything. John Feehery, President of QGA Communications and a veteran of five conventions, cautions against a major first-time mistake, dont get stuck in a volunteer job that keeps you working well past midnight. The Parties The action at convention, says Feehery is what happens outside the convention hall. Tickets to the larger parties with well-known bands are hard to come by, but dont worry about the big events, says Soltis. Just keep your eyes open for neat opportunities! With literally hundreds of events happening outside the official program, dont try to do too much, advises Finn. Pick 1-2 events per night. And while it may seem like one giant party, this isnt Spring Break, counsels Dayspring. Remember that every Republican in Tampa in some small way represents the Romney/Ryan campaign. Lastly, a bit of sartorial advice from Dayspring: Gentlemen, bring an extra tie, because you are going to stain yours. Ladies, avoid the guys walking around with stained ties, theyve likely had too much to drink. See you in Tampa. New York Times: Debates denied, Univision turns to candidate forums http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/debates-denied-univision-turns-to-candidate-forums/ Amy Chozick August 23, 2012 Univisions request for an official presidential debate may have been rejected, but the Spanish language

network has succeeded in securing both candidates attendance at Meet the Candidate forums, the network said late Thursday afternoon. President Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney will sit down on separate nights for a question-and-answer session moderated by Univisions Jorge Ramos and Maria Elena Salinas. The sessions will take place in front of a live audience and will most likely air on a delay with Spanish-language translation, a Univision spokeswoman said. The dates of the interviews have not yet been determined. Although Univision has interviewed presidential candidates in the past, the upcoming events will mark the first time both parties presidential nominees have sat down for this type of longer, interactive discussion. That level of access underscores the importance of the countrys 21 million registered Hispanic voters, especially in key swing states like Florida, Nevada and Colorado. As the No. 1 Spanish-language network, Univision serves as the only source of TV news for many of its viewers who do not watch NBC or CNN. The network said it had partnered with Facebook and will solicit questions from viewers via social media before each Meet the Candidate forum. Last week, Randy Falco, Univisions chief executive, wrote a letter urging the Commission on Presidential Debates to add a debate that would focus on issues like education, health care and immigration that particularly resonate with Hispanic voters. After the Commission rejected Mr. Falcos proposal, Mr. Ramos, a host on Univisions evening newscast used his prime-time program to urge both candidates to speak directly to Univision viewers. These events speak to President Obama and Governor Romney recognizing the important role Hispanic America will play in the elections and in defining the future of our country, Isaac Lee, Univisions president of news, said in a statement. According to recent polls, Mr. Romneys selection of vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan has tightened the race in Florida where, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, Hispanics make up 13.1 percent of the states more than 11.2 registered voters. Bloomberg BusinessWeek: Everything Changing for Convention Coverage http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-08-22/everything-changing-for-convention-coverage#p1 David Bauder August 22, 2012 NEW YORK (AP) On the surface, television networks will cover the upcoming Republican and Democratic national conventions much like they have the past few election cycles generally an hour each night on the big broadcasters, more or less full time with the cable news networks. Below the surface, things are dramatically different. The Internet will give people more access to convention halls and a greater opportunity to become part of the political conversation. The popularity of social media and people experiencing big events on TV with tablets and smartphones has driven up TV ratings, most dramatically and recently for the Olympics, and television executives are curious to see if the trend continues in Tampa, Fla., and Charlotte, N.C. "It is possible that social media and the discourse we can see there can help transform the conventions into something more dynamic again, something that involves the public," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News Channel, PBS and C-SPAN are live streaming the convention online pretty much from start to finish, besides what is being offered on television. ABC News' online feed will mimic a television newscast for three hours prior to the network coming on the air. Bloomberg will stream economy-focused panel discussions that it holds with convention figures. PBS is stationing live webcams at the convention halls and surrounding areas. NBC News will host "hangouts" with some of its correspondents on Google Plus. CSPAN's TV and online coverage is commentary-free. The activity reverses a decades-long trend of television networks compressing coverage on the theory that the conventions have become stage-managed events largely free of news. Yet they are important to candidates, offering the best filter-free way to reach the public along with the presidential debates. For three nights over two weeks in 2008, more than 40 million people watched convention speeches by candidates Barack Obama, John McCain and Sarah Palin on television. Twitter and Facebook were barely a speck on the horizon in 2008. Their growing influence speaks directly to the reasons people follow big events: Asked by Pew two years ago why they keep up with the news, the largest percentage of Americans 72 percent said it was because they enjoy talking with friends and family about what is going on. "Social media adds a new layer to this gigantic nonevent," said Jeff Jarvis, a media critic who writes the Buzzmachine.com blog. "It's becoming fascinating. We could all be there. We don't all want to be there but we can talk about it, and that can be more newsworthy than the actual event." The Olympics were NBC's eye-opener to the power of social media. Others have their own stories. When Mitt Romney proposed a $10,000 bet to Texas Gov. Rick Perry in a December debate, it was barely noticed at the debate hall, but exploded on Twitter and influenced ABC's decision to emphasize it in debate sum-up, said Marc Burstein, senior executive producer at ABC News in charge of convention coverage. The challenge for networks comes in harnessing social media for effective use in their coverage. "I can't say anybody has found the secret sauce yet but there's a lot of great experimenting going on," said Mark Lukasiewicz, producer in charge of NBC's convention coverage. "One of the fantastic things about this is you do get real-time feedback about what you do on the air." NBC is trying several different approaches, including flashing Twitter messages at the bottom of its TV screen, setting up several hashtags to gather tweets and give both viewers and correspondents a destination to share thoughts, streaming speeches on Facebook and hiring a company to measure the sentiment of online commentary. ABC, by contrast, is keeping its social media plans quiet in advance. "You'd be a fool to ignore social media," Burstein said, "and we don't plan to do so." Current TV is trying a bold new approach, devoting half of its screen to a real-time Twitter feed divided into dozens of categories. Viewers can see what mainstream media figures are tweeting, what politicos attached to Obama or Romney are saying, and even voters in key swing states. The tweets will take up more screen space than pictures from the convention or commentators like Al Gore.

On TV, Current producers choose the Twitter feeds that run on the air. Online, viewers can choose what feeds to follow. "There's a swirl of conversation going on right now in the country, and TV has never found a way to tap into it," said David Bohrman, who runs Current. The different online approaches also speak to the spirit of experimentation. NBC is offering an unadorned gavel-to-gavel feed because it is also providing a network summary (except for Wednesday, Sept. 5, when it is pre-empted by a football game) and full nights of coverage anchored by the left-leaning anchor team on MSNBC. CBS is preparing online specials for both directly before and after its television coverage, the latter anchored by Scott Pelley. PBS will have presidential historians on hand for analysis of convention speeches. The online specials allow CBS a chance to reach an audience that doesn't normally follow the network regularly, said Susan Zirinsky, who is producing the network's coverage. "It affords us an opportunity on exciting new platforms to spread our original reporting, our seasoned veterans and coverage that can give you a wide perspective," she said. "I think that's way cool." Lead anchors on the network coverage include Pelley on CBS, Brian Williams on NBC, and Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos on ABC. The Republicans meet next week in Tampa, with the Democrats meeting the following week in Charlotte. With the dynamic media landscape, the media's long-held role as agenda-setters is changing, too. The convention coverage will be much watched to see who can best take advantage of them and rule a world where tablets, smartphones and laptops are as much a part of many people's big-event experience as flatscreen TVs. "I have five screens at my desk right now," Lukasiewicz said. "That's kind of where I max out." National Journal: How Mitt Romney Goes Digital http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/how-mitt-romney-does-digital-20120822#.UDUhOlDR_3E.facebook Adam Mazmanian August 22, 2012 Mitt Romneys social-media guru does not quantify success in his candidates number of Facebook followers, but by their level of activity. Despite a recent Pew report that pegs President Obama as winning the battle for digital audiences, Zac Moffatt, the head of the Romney campaigns digital operation, says that the Republican candidate is ahead of Obama in terms of building an engaged and dedicated online following. The raw numbers lean Obamas way. He has more than 27 million "likes" on his Facebook page, for example, versus fewer than 5 million for Romney. But according to Moffatt, Romneys followers are more likely to share information, post, and spread the word about their candidate. He cites June 28, the day of the Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act as an example. On that day, he says, the Romney campaign saw activity in the form of comments or sharing from 27 percent of their list of followers, compared to 1.7 percent for Obama. Thats how Id define success for us, Moffatt says. This is a tough sell. Obamas campaign team is legendary for its online prowess and its data-driven digital outreach. The Obama campaign appears to have raised the bar yet again, with the release of a mobile app that integrates digital outreach with the door-to-door shoe-leather efforts of volunteers, providing

canvassers with voter-registration lists, neighborhood maps, campaign talking points, and a fundraising interface. According to Moffatt, the release of this app so late in the game points to the challenges of leveraging digital assets in the real world. The Obama folks knew they were going to be running for president three years ago, he said. It took them 100 days to build out this app that does all these pieces. You should look at that as realistic of how difficult it is to build a multipurpose, integrated app. The Romney campaign still has millions of doors being hit every month, whether or not we have an app, Moffatt says. That just reduces some of the barriers, but its not going to stop us from doing what we do every day. The Romney campaign does have a couple of apps, including one that was built to deliver advance news of the candidates vice-presidential pick. Although the app failed to scoop the press on the news about Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., it did generate 100,000 "likes" on the Romney campaigns Facebook page, Moffatt says, while gathering e-mail addresses and other data on potential supporters. The campaign has been mum on how it is going to retool its Mitts VP app for the general-election drive, but Moffatt says he has a plan. I wouldnt be much of a digital director otherwise, he says. Using search and other online media as a conduit to more standard advertising fare is an important part of the online media mix. Moffatts research has shown that in a given week, there are one in three voters who dont watch live television other than sports. That just means they live on DVR, Netflix, and Hulu. If we ran our entire campaign predicated on TV, thats a lot of voters were missing, he says. In Ohio, that figure could be 2 million voters. The election will be won or lost most likely in that group, Moffatt says. In the Nevada caucuses, for example, the Romney team placed an ad on Googles search engine that directed people searching for information on Newt Gingrich to an ad that criticized the former House Speaker for taking consulting fees from federally backed mortgage-finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In the 2012 cycle, Moffatt says, digital has seen a transformation from a base list-building and fundraising effort to becoming a persuasion and mobilization tool. In 2008, digital strategy was not a major piece of Romneys primary-election bid. Now, Moffatt says, the numbers make it impossible to ignore. Romneys immediate family is more engaged on digital than in the past, and this has meant greater exposure for the candidate to social media. Ann Romney was an early adopter of the photo-sharing site Pinterest. Romney's sons are active on Twitter and Facebook. Presumptive vice-presidential nominee Ryan has a lot of everyday, hands-on experience with social media. Whenever it breaks into your peer groups, it makes a difference, Moffatt says. Where the election wont be won or lost, Moffatt says, is on Twitter. Hes a little irate about the Pew report, which gives the Romney campaign low marks for use of Twitter, and criticizes both campaigns for failing to engage ordinary users via retweets.

We try to keep the Twitter account in Mitts voice, and have him be a part of it. It limits the amount we do. Were not able to tweet 25 times a day like the Obama folks have. Thats not to say that the candidate is tapping out his own tweets, or even dictating them to staff. Its more often that something will occur, and hes like, 'We should get that out on Twitter,' Moffatt says. Lost Remote: Inside Look at CNN and Facebooks First Election Analysis http://lostremote.com/an-inside-look-at-cnn-and-facebooks-first-analysis-of-the-election_b33289 Natan Edelsberg August 20, 2012 In July CNN and Facebook announced a major partnership around the election. Americas Choice 2012 is an analysis of Facebooks more than 160 million users in the U.S. and CNNs multi-platform audience. Their first big report is out and we spoke to Michelle Jaconi, CNNs Executive Producer of Cross-Platform programming about the results. The major headline of the new announcement is that Ryan has knocked Obama off as the most talked about player in the election. While this isnt completely surprising, seeing as the big announcement just happened last week, its great to see the Facebook data back it up. Its also interesting that Biden is number three after Obama, but before Romney. In the report, which can be accessed on CNN.com, they also look at the candidates Facebook growth. Obamas in a strong lead with 27.8 million likes, but Ryan already has over 100,000 more likes than Biden. You can also see how the candidates likes breakdown by gender. Lost Remote: How is CNN approaching publishing content from this partnership? Michelle Jaconi: The partnership is truly cross-platform, taking advantage of one area in which both CNN and Facebook dominate: Reach. The partnership has a robust mobile app, editorial content and interactives online, and on television, as well as CNNs Political Gut Check daily newsletter. The Paul Ryan announcement was a great example of using technology to help tell a story instead of the reverse. We surveyed our Facebook users and integrated their live comments and feedback into our on air broadcast, while noting the political region most active surrounding the announcement. LR: How is it a new social kind of reporting? Jaconi: It is new mainly because there is no way we could do this in 2008 with the same penetration rate. There are 160 million monthly active users on Facebook in the United States. In 2008, there were 35 million monthly active users in America. In laymans terms: Facebook has now half of the US population in its networks. If that isnt interesting politically, I dont know what is? Especially when you take into account that people are most often influenced to vote by opinion leaders in their social circle, it makes this partnership intellectual candy. Furthermore, this has been accurately called the first mobile election, and in politics that is what makes this interesting. It is always my goal to get out of Washington and learn from the American voter; and this allows us to engage and listen to American voters wherever we are. LR: How many more of these stories will there be?

Jaconi: Facebook will be integrated into all our big convention, debate and election broadcasts and will be a consistent part of the digital story from here thru the election. As for the sweeping analytical pieces, we will write about the data every time it helps us tell a story. Huffington Post: 2012 Conventions Embrace Social Media Openness http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20120817/us-conventions-social-media/ Jeffrey Collins and Tamara Lush August 17, 2012 CHARLOTTE, N.C. Democrats and Republicans are using social media to turn their national conventions away from the smoke-filled rooms of yore and into meetings where anyone who wants to get involved is just a click away, no matter where they are. Both parties' ambitious plans reflect the maturation of social media sites that played a much smaller role in the conventions four years ago. The Republicans call theirs a "convention without walls," while the Democrats say their gathering will be "the most open and accessible in history." Democrats will not just show prime-time speeches live on the Internet, but will also stream caucus meetings and the council discussions of the party's platform and ideals over the Web. Republicans have hired a fulltime blogger and a full-time digital communications manager to do nothing but engage people online. The conventions' Facebook and Twitter sites are already stoking interest in the events, with photos of the Republican stage under construction in Tampa or profiles of Democratic volunteers and delegates. Users can interact with a mouse click, such as one who urged friends to help the GOP convention Twitter feed muster more followers than its counterpart. Both had more than 10,000 followers Friday. Social media was still in its infancy four years ago. The number of items posted on Twitter on Election Day 2008 is equal to about six minutes worth of tweets today, the social media company recently wrote on its blog. The dramatic changes in social media have required both parties to almost start from scratch in developing strategies for incorporating Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Flickr into their conventions. In 2008, Republicans hired a web vendor to handle all things Internet for their convention. Now, there's a dedicated social media team with its own "Social Media War Room" in the Tampa Convention Center. The party's biggest push through the Internet will come through videos on YouTube, Republican National Convention spokesman James Davis said. "Our goal is to leverage these technologies, to reach every American, whether they are in Toledo, Ohio, the convention floor in Tampa or a forward operating base in Afghanistan," he said. Democrats will have a similar setup at their convention Sept. 4-6 in Charlotte. (Republicans meet a week earlier in Tampa.) "We're able to expand it even further and invite the whole country to participate in a more interactive way then you might traditionally experience by tuning into a television," said Nikki Sutton, director of digital media for the 2012 Democratic Convention.

And those planning protests are using the Internet to get organized, too. The March on Wall Street South, which plans to bring thousands to Charlotte to rally against big business and economic inequality, has a website, Facebook page and Twitter account. Organizers hope to use the Web to direct people to sites in more than a dozen states where they can take buses to Charlotte to join in the various protests during the week. Social media is allowing modern-day campaigns and political parties to get their messages out unfiltered. That's especially useful as broadcasters and newspapers have drastically reduced the amount of air time and space they devote to conventions. Convention organizers will use social media to emphasize themes that might get lost in the traditional media's limited coverage, said Daniel Kreiss, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill journalism school who authored a book about the use of new media from former presidential candidate Howard Dean to President Barack Obama. "There's just not a lot of convention coverage that is going to be offered by the major networks, and this becomes a way that individual figures' speeches get publicity," Kreiss said. Social media is increasingly allowing parties to control their message and spreading those key messages through an online network of "friends" may allow them to create a sense of credibility, Kreiss said. It will be "viewed as more credible and more authentic" than less-personal media coverage. The candidates' overall campaigns are also ratcheting up efforts to reach voters online. A report released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center found that President Barack Obama's campaign was more active than Republican Mitt Romney's on the digital front. The group's Project for Excellent in Journalism analyzed both campaigns' efforts between June 4-17 and found Obama's team posted almost four times as much content during the period and maintained an active presence on almost twice as many platforms. But Romney's campaign said his Facebook page has more people who share or comment on his posts. Of course, the only metric that matters will be votes in November, and both campaigns and their parties think social media will be critical to get their voters excited enough to go to the polls. Democrats have already released a smartphone app that provides one place for videos, blog posts and photos. The app also includes an interactive map to help visitors to Charlotte find convention locations or restaurants. Their convention Facebook site has been running posts spotlighting different delegates and volunteers from across the country for months. Its Flickr page included more than 150 photos from people who printed out a special "I'm There" logo and had their pictures made with it, promising to either be in Charlotte or to follow the convention online. One person holding up his sign on the site is Vice President Joe Biden. On the GOP convention's Facebook page, a posting showed a picture of lighting rigs inside the Tampa Bay Times Forum and said: "The lights are on and we only have 17 more days to go! Are you ready to nominate the next President of the United States?? The entry had more than 360 "likes" and 400 comments on Wednesday afternoon.

The Democrats used Twitter to invite more than a dozen followers on a tour in July. They got to see TimeWarner Arena, where most of the convention is taking place the first week in September, and the city's football stadium, where Obama will give his acceptance speech. For Rashon Carraway, the tour was a dream come true. He sells men's clothes online, but the political science major in college hasn't forgotten his first love. "This was a great opportunity for me to get an up close and personal look at something I am passionate about, and I have always wanted to do," said Carraway. He plans to attend as many convention events as he can using his cellphone to make online posts. And it's just not the parties and protesters who have an interactive strategy. Donna Chen, the director of marketing and communications for the Tampa Downtown Partnership said more than 15 tourism and convention groups are setting up their own "Social Media Command Center" for the convention. Tampa Bay and Co., the area's tourism and marketing agency, is coordinating the effort. They'll use the hashtag "TampaBay" to curate the posts. Chen said about 50 local experts will monitor and interact with people online. They will staff the center and answer questions about the area from people in town for the convention for instance, "where's a good Italian restaurant?" or "What's the closest beach to downtown Tampa?" POLITICO: Republicans Plan a Tech-Heavy Convention http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/79831.html Steve Freiss August 17, 2012 Republicans wont drive Web traffic during their upcoming convention to the partys website, but rather to a tricked-out YouTube page customized with social media tools and with live video streaming from the podium. That move is one of several the RNC will announce later today as plans shape up for what convention organizers hype as a convention without walls involving partnerships with Google, Microsoft, Facebook and AT&T among others. That move is one of several the RNC will announce later today as plans shape up for what convention organizers hype as a convention without walls involving partnerships with Google, Microsoft, Facebook and AT&T among others. The focal point is actually going to be this highly specialized YouTube page that includes social conversations, social data, info graphics, photos and videos as well, RNC spokesman James Davis said. It will not look like a normal YouTube channel. No beta version or rendering is available, but the site will replace whats presently viewable at youtube.com/gopconvention at some point before the RNC opening on Aug. 27.

Google, the social platform and livestream provider for the RNC, is also building a backstage Conversation Room from which speakers are expected to participate in Google Hangout chats as they prepare for or depart from the podium. Say Congressman So-and-So has a speech, they may elect to go to the Conversation Room before the speech and do a Hangout with constituents back in their home state, Davis said. Another element of the Conversation Room a Skype station points to the RNCs relationship with Microsoft, its official innovation provider. The software company is setting up three spaces for politicians, experts or journalists to use high-definition Skype video to conduct interviews with local TV stations around the country that cant afford to send reporters or crews to Tampa. Microsoft also will have another Skype setup at the Tampa Bay Times Forum, site of the convention, and one at the Tampa Convention Center, where some 15,000 journalists will be decamped. AT&T, the official wireless provider for the RNC, is also creating the Tampa2012 smartphone application for the party. The app, to be released next week, will allow non-attendees to view convention proceedings and participate in online discussions, as well as provide delegates and the media with the schedule of convention events. All of that will be on the app before it goes anywhere else, Davis promised. AT&T and Verizon both have worked in recent months to beef up their cell coverage in anticipation of a tsunami of data traffic during the convention. In addition to millions of dollars in additional hardware installed to handle the traffic, both carriers also will deploy mobile cell towers known as COWS, or cells on wheels. Were better than ready in Florida, AT&T Florida President Marshall Criser said. Were excited about it. The Republican convention coming to Florida is a signature event for the state. Its an opportunity to show what Florida is capable of.

Past conventions have been record-setting events for local data usage and that was long before Twitter and Facebook gained their current popularity. AT&T reported having transmitted 244 million text messages during the four days of the 2008 DNC in Denver as well as high-water marks for data use in the Minneapolis region during the 2008 RNC there. Verizon, too, saw huge surges at past conventions and expects to in Tampa, as well as the Democratic convention in Charlotte next month. This will be record levels, tens of billions of connections per day, Verizons Florida spokesman Chuck Hamby said of the 35,000 visitors expected in Tampa. These are going to be very data-savvy users. This will be record levels, tens of billions of connections per day, Verizons Florida spokesman Chuck Hamby said of the 35,000 visitors expected in Tampa. These are going to be very data-savvy users. One outside event expected to drive a surge of data usage is an all-day rally at the University of South Floridas Sun Dome on Aug. 26, starring Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas.) Paul followers, Hamby noted, are known for being tech savvy.

On the Facebook front, in addition to hosting several parties and panel events, the social media company will have Photo Spots at various locations around the RNC where conventioneers can swipe a special badge and then shoot commemorative photos that automatically get posted to their Facebook timelines. They will have an app built with CNN through which users may declare allegiance to candidates and evangelize to their friends in English or Spanish. Convention technology has been advancing in the young millennium. Microsoft first got involved in 2000, and as late as 2004 their primary contribution was Office programs used to run registration and other backoffice functions. In 2008, the software giant had touch-screen devices at the RNC and DNC that allowed delegates to explore convention history. This time, in addition to the Skype stations, Microsoft is providing customized software that makes it easy to sort delegates by region and demographics and will place 82 multi-touch "magic wall" maps around the halls that can drill down to counties and let people look at what might happen if this county goes to either candidate, Microsoft director of campaigns and elections Stan Freck said. There will also be some use of Xbox, but the company declined to discuss specifics as yet. Unless you were behind the scenes in years past, you as a delegate werent necessarily seeing Microsoft technology as much, Freck said This year, you will. All of this is aimed at ginning up interest, activating the faithful and showing how modern the GOP has become during a convention that will be devoid of suspense or drama. Were trying to make this convention as dynamic as it is transformative, Davis said. Were doing a lot of firsts. POLITICO: Technology Giants to Descend on Conventions http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=4F4758A4-EB21-45BB-80B0-B89A2846926A Emily Schultheis August 16, 2012 Republicans call Tampa a convention without walls. Democrats say Charlotte will be the most open and accessible convention in history. Theyre not talking about breaking down partisan barriers that drive people away from politics. Instead, theyre hoping that the thousands of politicos attending the party gatherings, and the many more back home watching from afar, will happily engage through social media. This years conventions will be the first in which newer social media platforms like Twitter, as well as mobile devices like iPhones and iPads, will take center stage and other, older online tools and sites like Google and Facebook have come into their own. Its the first time the conventions have really gone digital in a major way. This really will be the first national political convention in the social-networking era, said Kyle Downey, press secretary for the Republican convention. Even just since four years ago, the entire universe of social networking has changed were going to take advantage of this. The big tech firms will also be there, including Google, Facebook and Twitter.

Google is planning a big presence at both conventions and will run a YouTube livestream of all prime-time speeches and events, meaning people who arent at the convention can watch the proceedings on any device back home. Facebook will also have staffers on hand in both cities running a series of workshops and events aimed at helping people use the social-networking platform. Theyll have Apps & Drinks events where Facebook developers can demonstrate how election-related apps work, a series of Innovation Nation receptions and are participating in briefings on 2012 and the impact of social media. Employees on the ground are also setting up Photo Spots that will allow convention-goers to upload pictures directly to their Facebook timelines. The tech company also sees one of its major goals at the conventions as giving delegates and convention attendees easy ways to share what theyre doing, seeing, and hearing with family, friends, and others on Facebook, Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said in a statement. This will also allow people who are not in Tampa or Charlotte to easily experience what its like to be at the conventions alongside their Facebook friends. And while Twitter has yet to announce all of its plans for the confabs, Mindy Finn, who heads Twitters strategic partnerships in Washington, said the company will have several representatives on the ground to help the parties and politicians optimize their Twitter use and utilize promoted tweets. What we want to do is work with elected officials and campaigns and journalists and others to make best use of the platform around an event where theres going to be such an intense focus, she said. Its not just parties and tech titans that plan to leverage the rise of smartphones and social media: Tampa and Charlotte will see an unprecedented amount of mobile advertising by outside groups, not to mention all the social media activity from convention-goers and speakers themselves. Ensuring social media is fully incorporated into the conventions is something both parties are focused on: In addition to the large digital staffs inside the campaigns of Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama, the convention committees in each host city also have designated staff to work on digital and social media efforts. The VP selection, convention and three debates are structured events where people will be paying attention, said Zac Moffatt, digital director for Romneys campaign. Any campaign that didnt leverage that would be doing a disservice to the candidate. And leverage it the campaigns will: While many plans are still being finalized, Romney and Obama both plan to spread their messages via YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other digital platforms, taking advantage of the fact that most convention-goers and many people watching around the country have smartphones or tablets. And in a move that further reflects the growing dominance of smartphones, both Republicans and Democrats have been developing mobile apps related to the conventions. Democrats released their DNC 2012 mobile app on Tuesday, which will feature videos and photos from the convention as it unfolds as well as maps and information about the city of Charlotte. Republicans plan to have an app available before their Aug. 27 convention begins.

Both parties plan to provide behind-the-scenes video and blog access that will be available for people inside and outside the convention hall, plus live chats or Google+ hangouts to give people a chance to chat with major players. Features like this will give people not at the convention almost voyeuristic access to what theyre not seeing on TV in prime time, said Vincent Harris, a GOP digital strategist who worked on Rick Perrys presidential campaign. In January, the Democratic convention committee asked supporters to share their ideas on how to engage more people in the convention process. They responded, said Nikki Sutton, director for digital media at the convention in Charlotte and increased social media presence was one of their main demands. And last month, when Democrats got the keys to the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte to start transforming it into the convention site, the committee held its first-ever Tweetup an effort to give Twitter followers an inside tour of the venue and the ability to ask questions along the way. From the very beginning, weve used social media as a tool to have a back-and-forth conversation a twoway conversation with Americans from all over the country, Sutton said. Both conventions are also a rich advertising market for issue-based advocacy groups to deliver their messages to likely voters and political activists particularly through various forms of mobile advertising, targeted geographically toward people at the conventions. Its pretty safe to assume that the majority of delegates and media who are in Tampa and Charlotte will have smartphones, said Rob Saliterman, who oversees Republican political advertising at Google. And that provides a lot of new opportunities for issue-advocacy groups to reach the people who they most want to be in front of. One such group is the U.S. Travel Association, which is buying mobile search ads around terms like Tampa hotel or Charlotte restaurants to promote its Vote Travel ad campaign. We figure theres going to be a lot of folks on mobile and tablet in those areas so were focusing in, said Blain Rethmeier, the groups senior vice president for public affairs. If people are on the bus waiting to get to the convention center, or shuttling from once place to another, mobile is one place were primarily focused on. Some of the advertising, both at the convention and around the country, may come from the convention speakers themselves, Harris said. What will Mike Huckabee do during his speech? What will he do after his speech? What will he do to capitalize on the attention after the speech? Harris asked. I think youre even going to see speakers run things like promoted tweets and promoted stories nationally to help capitalize on attention to the convention. And given the generally scripted nature of conventions in recent decades, the all-encompassing presence of social media at this years gatherings may actually help create more buzz about the conventions around the country.

When theres breaking news, the political class turns to Twitter, Finn said. There will be different news unfolding throughout the day with everyone moving around those events; wed expect Twitter to play an enormous role in how they are communicating. Really all the blogosphere and the hyperengaged Twitterverse are going to be talking about is whats going on at the conventions, even when major prime-time speeches arent going on, Harris said. But theres also a downside to all the extra attention, said Democratic digital strategist Jeff Jacobs. Twitter (and Facebook to a lesser extent) allow the conventions to more quickly go off-script, he told POLITICO via email. Minor gaffes, celebrity sightings, after-hours events: all will now have an instant audience of millions. Another major aspect of the social media buzz around the conventions will be the huge volume of tweets and Facebook posts that convention delegates and attendees will share with their friends back home. GOP convention spokesman Downey agreed. The vast majority of convention participants are going to have a cellphone in their pocket, and theyre going to be able to share their experience in an unfiltered way with the rest of the world thats never been done before, he said. BuzzFeed: For a Social Republican Convention, Website is Second http://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpolitics/for-a-social-republican-convention-website-is-s August 16, 2012 The Republican National Convention will organize its digital presence around its YouTube page, rather than its website, an unconventional move that reflects the central place of social platforms Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, primarily in American politics. The convention's communications director, James Davis, told BuzzFeed the RNC is about to roll out a customized YouTube page that will carry both the convention livestream and key videos, but will also have space for the Twitter conversation around the convention and for social metrics indicating what people are talking about. "The website will have basic information but this is going to be the focal point for online activity," Davis said. "Why take someone to a website that has stale information on it when you can take them to a dynamic and informative and engaging experience?" "Everything is going to point to the YouTube page during the convention," he said of the plan, under the rubric "Convention Without Walls." The RNC's plan reflects a broader shift in the web toward social platforms like Twitter which captured the conversation that had taken place on political blogs in earlier cycles and Facebook, which has a far larger general audience. Google, which owns YouTube, is a partner with the RNC and has also built the infrastructure for a digital center. (Google, whose Google + has failed to emerge a as major social space, is the convention's "Official Social Platform.") The center will include a "conversation room" for members of Congress and other top

Republicans to host Google Hangouts or participate in Twitter, Facebook, or Skype conversations with constituents, according to a press release from the convention committee. The committee, Davis said, will also release a mobile app soon that, along with including local information for Tampa visitors, will allow people who aren't there to plug into the political conversation. "We will also have the social conversation embedded in the app," Davis said. Charlotte Magazine: Facebook to Offer Drinks & Apps, Co-Host Innovation Nation and More at RNC and DNC http://www.charlottemagazine.com/Blogs/The-DNC-In-The-CLT/August-2012/Facebook-to-Offer-AppsDrinks-Co-host-Innovation-Nation-and-More-at-RNC-and-DNC/ Jarvis Holliday August 16, 2012 Facebook has announced its on-the-ground plans for the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa and the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. Like many large companies and media networks, the worlds largest social media site is offering nearly identical experiences at each convention. Here are some edited highlights from the Facebook announcement:

On the Monday of each convention week (August 27 in Tampa and September 3 in Charlotte), representatives from Facebooks Politics and Government Team will participate in a briefing hosted by National Journal and The Atlantic, along with CBS News, that will explore social media's impact on the 2012 races. The briefings will be live-streamed. Also during the conventions, members of the Facebook developer community and Facebook product and public policy teams will mix and mingle with journalists and other invited guests at an Apps & Drinks event. Developers who have built election-related apps on FBs platform will be on hand to offer demonstrations of their technologies and engage in discussions. Facebook will also co-host Innovation Nation receptions honoring pro-technology legislators and highlighting the contributions of leading high-tech innovators to the strength of the American economy. FB is also a co-sponsor of StartUp RockOn events in both cities to celebrate Americas startup culture. In addition to events and a physical presence at the conventions, Facebook will curate and present what participants are saying publicly on the site about their convention experience as well as what users around the world are sharing. Facebook and CNN plan to demo a new I'm Voting Facebook application for conventioneers, enabling users to commit to voting, endorse specific candidates, and solicit support from friends. Pledges will be visually displayed on an interactive map of the United States. The app will serve as a second screen for CNNs Americas Choice 2012 political coverage. Youre encouraged to like the U.S. Politics on Facebook page for regular updates from the conventions, campaign trail, and beyond.

Facebook has more than six times the number of users it had when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, now with 955 million users worldwide as of the end of June 2012. In the September issue of Charlotte magazine, which will be hitting newsstands in a few days, look for my article on the role social media and technology is playing at the Democratic National Convention. National Journal: Facebook Rolls Out Convention Plans http://www.nationaljournal.com/blogs/techdailydose/2012/08/facebook-rolls-out-convention-plans-16

Adam Mazmanian August 16, 2012 Facebook is putting a physical stamp on its virtual service at the Republican and Democratic party conventions this year, where delegates and attendees will be able to find advice on using social media for political outreach, and share photos with their friends back home. At "Photo Spots," convention goers can have pictures taken and uploaded to their profile pages. The social network's in-house team will offer advice on how to communicate messages from the convention to friends and supporters back home, and they've put together a checklist of best practices designed to help conventioneers maximize their social efforts. Facebook also plans to use the convention to launch its "I'm Voting" app, in partnership with CNN. Users who announce their decision to vote and their candidates of choice will be included in a large, interactive, stateby-state map designed to give a big picture of the voting intentions of the Facebook population. At "Apps & Drinks" events in the convention cities of Tampa, Fla., and Charlotte, N.C., developers of election apps will show off their creations and talk about the intersection of politics and social media. All Facebook: What does Facebook have in store for the Republican, Democratic conventions? http://allfacebook.com/republican-democratic-conventions_b97478 David Cohen August 16, 2012 With the 2012 presidential election approaching Nov. 6, Facebook outlined its plans for the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., Aug. 27-30, and the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., Sept. 4-6. The social network detailed some of the events and initiatives it will bring to both gatherings in a note on its U.S. Politics on Facebook page. Apps & Drinks: Members of Facebooks developer community and product and public-policy teams will meet with journalists and other invited guests and both conventions, with developers who have built electionrelated applications demonstrating their efforts and discussing the social networks open graph and app ecosystem. Briefings: On the Monday of each convention week Aug. 27 and Sept. 3, respectively representatives from Facebooks Politics & Government Team will be part of briefings hosted by National Journal, The Atlantic, and CBS News, focusing on the impact of social media on the 2012 political races. The briefings will be live-streamed so that remote viewers can participate. Innovation Nation: Facebook will co-host receptions at both events honoring pro-technology legislators and highlighting the contributions of leading high-tech innovators to the strength of the American economy. StartUp RockOn: The social network will co-host StartUp RockOn events at both conventions, celebrating the countrys startup culture. Photo Spots: 2012 Republican National Convention attendees will be able to swipe special badges at Facebook Photo Spots and instantly upload commemorative photos to their timelines, including a Photo Spot at the Woman Up! Pavilion at the Channelside Bay Plaza, one block from the Tampa Bay Times Forum, hosted by the YG Network and its Woman Up! initiative.

Im Voting: Facebook and CNN will demonstrate their new Im Voting app at both conventions. The app enables Facebook users to commit to vote for and endorse specific candidates and issues, and their commitments will be displayed on their timelines, news feeds, and tickers. Small business workshops: Facebook and the respective convention host committees organized events aiding small businesses owners with topics such as advertising on the social network, engaging with customers, and drawing more likes, with attendees receiving free Facebook advertising credits. Look for the red or blue Facebook T-shirts: Facebook will have experts on hand at both gatherings to help convention attendees, volunteers, state representatives, and county parties with their social networking efforts, providing dedicated work spaces. Look for red Facebook T-shirts in Tampa, and for blue ones in Charlotte. Convention Checklist: Facebook provided this handy guide to best practices for social networking at the conventions. Facebook said in its note detailing the initiatives: We hope to give thousands of delegates, convention staff and volunteers, journalists, assorted dignitaries, and other attendees easy ways to share what theyre doing and seeing on Facebook. Expanding the sphere of social engagement will also enable people who arent attending the conventions to experience what its like to be part of the action with their family and friends. As part of this effort, we will curate and present what participants are saying publicly on Facebook about their convention experience, as well as what Facebook users around the world are sharing publicly about these closely watched quadrennial gatherings. This will encourage discussion, civic participation, and uncover the real conversations happening in and around the big events. Readers: Are you attending either convention, or will you use Facebook to help keep you informed on the goings on? BuzzFeed: Romney, Not Obama, Is Winning The Social Media Race http://www.buzzfeed.com/vincentharris/romney-not-obama-is-winning-the-social-media-rac Vincent Harris 08/16/2012 A Pew Research Center study released this week spurred a round of inaccurate news stories claiming that the Obama campaign is dominating the Romney campaign online. Pew has a stellar reputation both in the academic and media communities, one that it has built up with a fantastic assortment of research and information relevant to many fields. This specific study though has a flawed data set, one that could hardly have been better designed to tell a positive story for the Obama campaign. The headline from Pews website reads, Obama Outpaces Romney in Social Media, Web Campaign, and the findings of the study are summed up in one of the opening sentences of the report: The Obama campaign is posting almost four times as much content and is active on nearly twice as many platforms. According to Pew the Obama campaign is outpacing Romney online because he is posting more content on Twitter/Facebook and because his campaign has more accounts on different social media sites. The studys results have been featured over the last 48 hours in CBS News, Politico, The Hill, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, and more.

Theres no doubt that Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla this election cycle. Every study shows that Facebook dominates where Internet users spend their time and my own campaign experience has proved it can be used as an effective fundraising tool. As of August 16th Barack Obama has a whopping 27 million fans of his Facebook page compared to only 4.3 million for Mitt Romney. Many in the press would use these raw numbers to crown Obama king of Facebook but in reality this should just be where the analysis begins. A closer look of the pages shows the exact opposite conclusion. Facebooks public Talking About figure showcases the number of people interacting with content on a Facebook page. This is the sum number of people who have liked, shared, or commented on pages content over a seven-day period. As of 12:30 a.m. Thursday, Mitt Romney had 1,579,476 people talking about his page compared with 1,354,550 for President Barack Obama. This means that more people are actually interacting with content on Mitt Romneys page than Barack Obamas page despite Obamas having an almost 7 to 1 advantage in total fans over Romney. This is a remarkable figure, one that I believe reflects the grassroots enthusiasm around the Paul Ryan announcement. If Obama were really outpacing Romney online he would need seven times as many people talking about his page than Romney has simply to remain proportional. In reality though, Obama has fewer people talking about his page. Researchers and reporters should take down this important note: its impossible to know how many posts/updates that pages are actually posting unless you are a page administrator. Facebook allows administrators to target posts by city or state. If the Obama and Romney campaigns are using Facebook effectively, theyd be posting state specific status updates and graphics/videos, etc. into individual states. These posts would not be public to the average visitor to their pages but the interactions with these posts would count in the overall talking about number. As campaigns continue to geo-target posts, the ability of the press and academic outlets to properly analyze pages will greatly diminish. The Romney campaign has been incredibly aggressive and innovative with their use of Facebook. Not only are they running many different fundraising ads but this week they even begun using Facebook Offers to sell yard signs and raise money for the campaign. Twitter is mentioned frequently in Pews summaries as well as in many of the related press stories. Lets be clear: Twitter is a tool for hyper-engaged politicos and grassroots activists. According to a study released by Pew only a few months ago only 15% of U.S. Internet users use Twitter and only 8% use it daily. Compare this to Facebook where over 75% of U.S. Internet users have accounts, with the average user spending more than 8 hours a month on the site and more than 40% of American users log in daily. Those at the Pew Research Center do themselves a disservice by comparing Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to each other when their scales are an order of magnitude or more apart. The Pew studys failings reflect a new challenge for those of us who try to understand digital content. Now, targeting is everywhere. Even content on websites can be personalized to a user based on such things as cookies or previous visits to the site. For example a first time user to Mitt Romneys website might see a different message and different content than someone who donated at the site or who signed up for a coalition. The Obama campaign also for example could highlight a certain constituency group (a term from the Pew study) based on geography. Someone in San Francisco could see Californians for Obama where someone in Iowa could see Farmers for Obama. Ive worked with candidates who have created subpages on websites not easily accessible to any site visitor but that exist to serve as landing pages from online advertising which is also targeted based on a variety of different data points. Because of all of this, its unfair to visit two websites and make a blanket statement about the effectiveness of their functionality and content.

There is one area where the Obama campaign does seem to be outpacing Romney: Email. While Facebook, Twitter, and Google, seek, and draw, a large share of media attention, they represent a relatively small portion of campaign fundraising. Pew didnt mention the best evidence that Obama continues to set the pace: His campaigns sophisticated use of split-tests and micro email campaigns. Theres no doubt that the Obama campaigns use of digital remains incredible, and certainly Obama 08 showed that the right digital campaign tied with the right candidate at the right moment can have its place in history. Journalists, academics, and others pontificating on the use of digital media in the 2012 Presidential election should read up and understand what theyre writing about before diving deep into subjects and writing misleading headlines read by millions of people. Its just simply not true that Obama is outpacing Mitt Romney online. And even if he was, researchers, journalists, and competitors like me might not even know it. Charlotte Observer: Facebook for Business in 4 Steps http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/08/15/3457035/facebook-for-business-in-4-steps.html Jennie Wong August 15, 2012 Yesterday I took part in the Facebook Small Business Boost event in Charlotte, along with scores of other small business owners and social media types. The event was hosted by Extravaganza Depot, where we gathered to hear the presentation, How to use Facebook to promote your small business. This unique opportunity to learn from the horses mouth was put on in partnership with the DNC Host Committee and the Charlotte Chamber. Mayor Anthony Foxx introduced presenter Brooke Oberwetter, who led the discussion and fielded audience questions at the end with help from Adam Conner, both out of Facebooks Washington, DC office. Heres an overview of the information provided. Step 1 Create your Facebook business page

Start at http://www.facebook.com/pages Click Create Page in the upper right corner Select your page type, e.g. Local Business Complete the short form of basic info Get your page ready for visitors with images, posts, and other content such as milestones

Step 2 Connect to your fans

Get people to like your business page using your Build Audience options such as inviting email contacts, Facebook friends, and ads Ads require a headline, text, and image and can be targeted by location, age, gender, and interests. For example, I created a mobile e-commerce ad for my web development business targeting people within 50 miles of Charlotte, age 25 and over, who are small business owners and college graduates

There are also additional targeting options available such as people who are connected to certain pages, apps, events, colleges, or employers

Step 3 Engage your fans with content

Once youve succeeded in getting people to like your page, engage them with quality content Depending on your business, you may want to post at least weekly, perhaps using the new ability to schedule your posts in advance Post Facebook-exclusive content, such as discount codes, to track your results Emphasize visual content such as photos and videos Be succinct, ask questions, be human!

Step 4 Influence the friends of your fans

Once your fans start interacting with your business page, their friends are more likely to check you out According to Facebook, people are 4 times more likely to make a purchase when an ad is associated with a friends name

Once you have a good grasp of the basics, use these links to learn more:

www.Facebook.com/marketing www.Facebook.com/business www.Facebook.com/help www.Facebook.com/advertising http://developers.facebook.com/ Mashable: Paul Ryan Helping Romney Unseat Obama from Digital Throne http://mashable.com/2012/08/15/paul-ryan-obama-social/ Alex Fitzpatrick August 15, 2012

President Obama has long been considered the most digitally engaged candidate and president of all time but is buzz over Paul Ryan helping the Mitt Romney campaign generate more online engagement than the Obama team? A Pew study released Wednesday found that Barack Obama holds a distinct advantage over Mitt Romney in the way his campaign is using digital technology to communicate directly with voters on the basis that the Obama campaign is posting four times the amount of content and is active on twice the number of platforms that the Romney team. However, the Pew study was based on data gathered throughout two weeks in early June well before Saturdays announcement of Paul Ryan as Romneys vice presidential pick. That announcement immediately led to a spike in interest on Twitter, with nearly 4,000 tweets per minute about Ryan being sent during the event. A radian6 analysis found that the announcement drove mentions of Romney over those of Obama for the first time in three months: Romneys digital team simultaneously rolled out new campaign-themed Facebook and Twitter profiles for Ryan, which have seen explosive growth: @PaulRyanVP has gained almost 28,000 new followers daily, while the Facebook page has more than 666,000 likes in four days 166,500 a day. Romneys online profiles have gotten a Ryan boost as well: the announcement pushed Romneys Facebook page over the 4 million mark and more than 1.5 million people are talking about him on the social network: an engagement rate of roughly 37%. While Obamas likes count still reigns supreme at just under 28 millon, he has less than a half-million users talking about his page: an engagement rate of less than 5%. Excitement over Ryan has benefitted the Romney campaigns online fundraising, too. According to Romneys Press Secretary Andrea Saul, the campaign raised $7.4 million online with more than 101,000 donations. The numbers speak for themselves, said Zac Moffatt, the Romney campaigns digital director, in an email to Mashable. In the first 72 hours over 600,000 people join Paul Ryan on Facebook, 100,000 on Twitter and 100,000+ online donations were made. People across the country are excited about a Romney Ryan ticket. Still, despite the occasional Twitter town hall and Google Hangout, neither Romney nor Obama have been extensively using social media as a place for interacting with voters. If the internet offers the promise of making campaigns more of a two-way conversation with citizens, the candidates are not participating, said Pew. For example, just 16% of Obamas tweets over the two-week period studied were retweets. The Romney campaign had just one retweet during this period something from Romneys son Josh. Is Romney beginning to dethrone Obama as the digital president, or is the Ryan bump just a product of temporary excitement? Do you want the candidates to engage with their social audience more than they have? Share your thoughts in the comments. CNN: Ryan Knocks Obama off Perch as Most Talked About on Facebook http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/13/politics/what-caught-our-eye/index.html Michelle Jaconi and Mark Preston August 14, 2012

Washington (CNN) -- A seven-term Wisconsin congressman, who 54% of the American people were not aware of last week, just knocked the president of the United States off of his perch as the most talked-about politician on the largest social media platform in the world. According to the exclusive Facebook-CNN Election Talk Meter, Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, in the first 54 hours after being announced as Mitt Romney's vice-presidential running mate, sucked up the political oxygen in the social media landscape -- with the Beltway topping the buzz and his home state of Wisconsin close behind. What caught our eye? The swing states of Virginia (where Ryan was announced) and New Hampshire were also high on the list: Facebook-CNN talk meter scores 1. Rep. Paul Ryan 5.21 2. President Barack Obama 4.84 3. Vice President Joe Biden 4.01 4. Gov. Mitt Romney 3.74 For perspective, when Michael Phelps became the most decorated Olympian in history on July 31, he registered a 6.51 on the same 1-10 scale. Top 10 states + D.C. buzzing about Ryan 1. Washington, D.C. 2. Wisconsin 3. Virginia 4. New Hampshire 5. Maryland 6. Minnesota 7. Massachusetts 8. Utah 9. Vermont 10. North Carolina

Note: The talk meter calculates a jump in buzz, so Ryan's relative anonymity helped him jump up the talk meter scale. Yet the growth wasn't just in buzz, but also in "likes" -- the Facebook term for social approval which enables people to follow your moves closely and voice their support to their social networks. Ryan's new fan page has grown from zero to more than half a million fans, already topping that of the sitting vice president, Joe Biden. Facebook fan growth at publication time Barack Obama 27.8 million fans currently Since August 1: Added 150,000 fans (+0.5%) Since Saturday: Added 9,900 fans (+0.03%) Joe Biden 355,000 fans currently Since August 1: Added 4,200 fans (+1.2%) Since Saturday: Added 728 fans (+0.2%) Mitt Romney 4.1 million fans currently Since August 1: Added 906,600 fans (+28.3%) Since Saturday: Added 111,400 fans (+2.8%) Paul Ryan 501,000 fans currently Since August: Fan page didn't exist On Saturday: Added 222,100 fans Since Saturday: Added 237,900 fans (+107.1%) Fans by state Barack Obama 1. California

2. New York 3. Texas 4. Florida 5. Illinois Joe Biden 1. California 2. New York 3. Florida 4. Texas 5. Illinois Mitt Romney 1. Texas 2. California 3. Florida 4. Georgia 5. Ohio Paul Ryan 1. Texas 2. Florida 3. California 4. North Carolina 5. Wisconsin We often say we write about demographics, not politics. Thus it comes as no surprise that we are once again writing about the gender gap and the age gap in this election -- something that the insights from Facebook reveal also exist online. Gender and age breakdown of Facebook fans

Barack Obama Average age: 28 Male: 51% Female: 49% Joe Biden Average age: 35 Male: 51% Female: 49% Mitt Romney Average age: 46 Male: 50% Female: 50% Paul Ryan VP Average age: 43 Male: 63% Female: 37% How this translates to the election will be something we keep our eye on from now until November. It's staggering when you put it in historical perspective: Today there are 160 million monthly active users on Facebook in the United States -- more than half the U.S. population. In 2008, there were 35 million monthly active users. WebProNews: Who is Paul Ryan? Lets Check His Facebook Page http://www.webpronews.com/who-is-paul-ryan-lets-check-his-facebook-page-2012-08 Josh Wolford August 13, 2012 Over the weekend, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney finally ended all the speculation and picked Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan to join him on the ticket. As the author of The Path to Prosperity (aka the Ryan budget) back in 2008, Ryan quickly made a name for himself in Washington. His plan, derided by some and lauded by others, called for drastic changes in entitlement spending most notably a gigantic shift in Medicare which would introduce a voucher program for seniors. Ryans proposals generated controversy then, and continued to do so through midterm elections

and beyond. Earlier this year, Ryan introduced a new version of his budget, adding the phrase A Blueprint for American Renewal to the plan. In the coming weeks, youre likely to hear a lot about Paul Ryan positive from one side and negative from the other. Youll hear that hes a radical, with economic ideas that would devastate the poor and elderly. Youll hear that hes a rising star, a visionary, and the future of the Republican party. Youll hear that he wants to end Medicare as we know it. Youll hear that hes bold, and brave enough to stand up for controversial ideas that he feels are right. Catch my drift? But before all of that gets into full swing, lets look at the fluffier side of Paul Ryan his Facebook info. A Paul Ryan VP page has already been set up, and has garnered over 430,000 likes. But its his older page, the Paul Ryan as Congressman page that has plenty of info on the Vice Presidential nominee. Lets take a look at the man who could be VP, according to his Facebook about page. Activities: Playing with my kids, bowhunting, mountain biking, mountain climbing Colorado Fourteeners, skiing, and reading Interests: economics, hunting, fishing, and most of all my family Favorite Books: Mere Christianity & The Screwtape Letters C.S. Lewis; Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand; The Road to Serfdom F.A. Hayek; The Way the World Works Jude Wanniski Favorite Music: Led Zeppelin, Grateful Dead, Metallica, Beethoven, Hank Williams, Jr., and more Favorite Movies: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly; Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Favorite TV Shows: The Prisoner, Monty Pythons Flying Circus He also lists a Teddy Roosevelt quote as his favorite quotation: It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat. Both Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have already started in on the campaign on Facebook. Although President Obama utilized Facebook to win in 2008, this is probably the first campaign that could be called a true social media campaign, as both sides are paying a lot of attention to building a presence. Forbes: Obama vs. Romney: Winning the War of Social Engagement http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/08/13/obama-vs-romney-winning-the-war-of-socialengagement/

Jason Beckerman August 13, 2012 Election Day 2012 looms less than 100 days away, and both presidential candidates are looking for any effective weapon to add to their arsenal as they try to influence voters. However, an analysis of Barack Obamas and Mitt Romneys Facebook pages reveals that neither is using social media to its full potential to excite his base, influence undecided voters, rally committed voters and attract new constituents. While both campaigns spend ever-increasing amounts on broadcast advertising, theyre not effectively leveraging their social audiences, the on-going free media opportunities those audiences provide, and their ability to amplify their messages through social media. At the most simplistic level number of fans the incumbent has a sizable advantage. Over 27 million people currently like the presidents Facebook page, compared to just 2.6 million for Mitt Romney. Team Romney should be asking itself why its not investing to acquire a larger base on the most powerful social platform on the Internet. After all, once someone likes a Facebook page, on average just 3% of users ever opt to unlike it. The President still has a huge and active community nearly four years after his history-making White House run, but hes not leveraging it as effectively as he could be. Its Not Audience Size That Matters: The Battle Is For Engagement Things have really changed since the 2008 election because of changes in the way that Facebook presents content to its users. On a daily basis, only 16% of people who have Liked a Facebook page will see any given story posted on that page. As a result, Obama has a typical reach of roughly 4.38 million people per story while Romney is capable of reaching just 416,000 users with each post. Neither number is small, but Obamas audience dwarfs Romneys in size. At first glance, it would seem that Obama is winning the social arms race. However, because of Facebooks changes, in some ways Romney is out-communicating a man with 27 million fans. Facebook made a fundamental switch in the way it measures activity when it launched the People Talking About This (PTAT) score. PTAT is a measure of how many users are commenting, liking, or sharing content from their news feeds, thus creating amplification. That amplification drives additional organic page growth, higher reach, and user actions. In July 2012, Obama had 1,209,452 Facebook users talking about him. That is a poor showing for a public figure with such a large following. On the other hand, Romney (and his much smaller audience) has a PTAT score of 992,000 people. This is a delta of over 300,000 in PTAT while there is a delta of 23,000,000 fans. Only 4% of Obamas audience is interacting with his content, while 38% of Romneys audience is interacting with that candidates post on an average rolling daily basis. How is this possible? Simply speaking, engagement is all about content and there are stark differences in the two candidates content strategies. Three posts from each candidate, displayed below, illustrate those differences: On his three posts, Obama racked up 128,049 likes, 18,285 comments, and 63,280 shares. Romney, on the other hand, dwarfs Obama on activity with 485,119 likes, 38,489 comments, and 88,519 shares. With just 10% of the fan base, Romneys fans are 65% more engaged than Obamas. With such a stark difference in engagement, content is driving Romneys performance:

 Obama uses very complex talking points that are heavy on text and numbers, while Romney calls out his points in very simple sentences. With a constant stream of branded messages on Facebook, user attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. They need to consume content within the scroll of the Facebook newsfeed if they are going to engage further, which subsequently raises a PTAT score for a branded page. Obamas message is most likely being lost on the vast majority of his fans due to complexity of messaging. Obama seems to use the same content that he would post on his blog or website. On the other hand, Romney is obviously creating specific content with bright call to actions for his Facebook presence. This allows users to not only consume the content, but follow explicit instructions for what Romney wants his users to do to propel his message to even more people. Its clear that while Obama is winning the arms race for the largest audience, Romney is far and away winning the war on engagement. So, what should the war plan be for each candidate? Obama Must Drive Engagement In order to change the game, and re-activate the audience which helped propel Obama to the presidency four years ago, he needs to devote budget to social advertising spend on Facebook. Since each story on Obamas timeline is reaching an estimated 16% of his total audience, Sponsored Stories are a perfect method for driving targeted reach into his 27,000,000 users. By turning on Sponsored Story amplification, Obama and his team can guarantee that his content will reach all 27,000,000 users who like his Facebook Page. That is a much more powerful tactic than TV advertising, and it can be targeted to specific pools of users to drive engagement. As an example, the campaign post below reached just four million users news feeds. By leveraging paid amplification, Obama could have amplified this message to every single woman who likes his Facebook page. Romney Must Drive Audience Growth Romneys big focus needs to be on audience acquisition. Since his user engagement is so high, what he needs now is to expand his reach. His campaign should work with industry experts to develop a user acquisition strategy that can be crafted to deliver the right users, in the right age ranges, in the most important battle ground states. By combining this strategy with his existing engagement strategies, Romney could increase his PTAT score far beyond what Obama is currently reporting, which would allow him to lay claim to being the winner of the war for engagement. Romney should be looking for new fans who are just as engaged and passionate as his existing base. With the right analytics tools, Romney can calculate the overall ROI of his audience acquisition campaigns and continue to drive cost effective reach into battleground states where he might currently be lacking the user base to compete effectively Much Room For Improvement as Election Day Approaches While both candidates have an active presence in social, neither are taking full advantage of the audiences they have. Never before in the history of the world have politicians been able to rally their constituents in a hyper-targeted fashion, and never has the production of content to reach those users been so cheap. There is a new battleground in this 2012 election and the biggest question is who will take the steps to win this war over the coming months by engaging with social advertising technology vendors to help these candidates drive intelligent consumer activation strategies. So far, it is Obamas game to lose, given the size of his audience, despite a relative lack of engagement.

All Facebook: Republican VP Nominee Paul Ryan No Stranger to Facebook http://allfacebook.com/paul-ryan-nominated-republican-vp_b97005 David Cohen August 13, 2012 Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who was announced as Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romneys running mate Saturday, is no stranger to Facebook, and the social network exploded with activity upon the revealing of the vice presidential nominee. The photo below was posted on Romneys Facebook page immediately after the rally in Virginia where the announcement was made Saturday morning. Shortly thereafter, the Paul Ryan VP Facebook page made its debut, and it had more than 409,000 likes at the time of this post. The Paul Ryan VP is also being promoted via Facebook ads, including sponsored stories in users mobile news feeds. And the U.S. Politics on Facebook page has been abuzz with Ryan-related activity, including:

A link to the photo from Romneys page, posted above. A link to a post on the Facebook page of Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), a reported finalist for the VP nomination, congratulating Ryan:

Mitt Romney has made a great choice in Paul Ryan. He is an accomplished public servant and a leading voice on the most pressing issues facing our country. Paul is one of my best friends in Congress and someone I have worked closely with as a former colleague on the House Ways & Means Committee. Jane and I wish Paul and Janna and their kids the very best. As the chairman of the Romney campaign in Ohio, I look forward to working with Paul to ensure that the Romney-Ryan ticket carries Ohio and is victorious in November. Most important, as a member of the Senate, I look forward to working closely with a Romney-Ryan administration to restore fiscal sanity and enact pro-growth policies to create jobs.

A link to the quick reaction from the Obama Truth Team in the form of an infographic, Five Things You Need to Know About Mitt Romneys VP Pick. Links to reactions from former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum and former Wisconsin Gov. and Republican Senate candidate Tommy G. Thompson reacting to Ryans nomination, with Santorum posting, Gov. Romney has made a great VP pick. Fiscal sanity is back! Looking forward to helping the Romney-Ryan ticket win in November!, and Thompson posting, We must surround the Romney/Ryan ticket with the strongest possible candidates on the ballot. We need a U.S. Senate candidate who will add to the momentum, not take from it. I am the only candidate who will not only win the Senate seat, but also help pull in votes for the Romney/Ryan team. Video from the House Republican Young Guns visit to Facebook headquarters last September, featuring Budget Committee Chairman Ryan, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy. Ryan said during the event:

The reason Im optimistic is this is a very precarious time in this country. We are really in a moment unlike others weve seen before. If we get this wrong, our best days will be behind us. But that not who we are, thats not what we do. We fix these problems. We see it as our obligation. If we dont like the direction that

Washington is headed, which we dont, we feel morally obliged to give you, the people, an alternative. So you can choose. Weve got to kick this thing upstairs so that people can choose. What we are trying to do, what we are aspiring to do, is reclaim that American idea of equal opportunity and upward mobility. We believe we need to have a safety net to help people who cannot help themselves, to help people who are down on their luck get back on their feet. But we dont want to convert that safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency because that drains them of their own incentive and will to make the most of their lives. What I see happening in this country is that through new media, people are taking charge, theyre getting involved, and they want to do something about it. And that is why at the end of the day, our culture and societys antibodies are going to kick in, and well fix this before we have a real debt crisis, before we have a real European situation on our hands. USA Today: Running for the Presidency, Youd Better Be on Social Media http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/politics/story/2012-08-12/romney-ryan-social-media/56987408/1 Laura Petrecca August 12, 2012 Traditional media took a backseat to the digital domain on Saturday with Mitt Romney's camp announcing the presidential candidate's running mate Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan via Twitter, Facebook and a "VP app" before sharing the news on TV. "Mitt's VP app" updated around 7 a.m. ET with word that Ryan had been selected. At 7:43 a.m., Romney tweeted that Ryan was his choice. Less than an hour later, Ryan sent out his first tweet from a new "PaulRyanVP" Twitter profile saying that he was "honored" to join Romney's team. A fresh Facebook page, under the "Paul Ryan VP" moniker, also appeared early Saturday. A little after 9 a.m., the duo shared their news via a televised event in Norfolk, Va.. Four years ago, President Obama's team was lauded for its innovative use of Internet outreach, particularly its skilled use of social media, to inform and galvanize supporters. Now, Twitter and Facebook updates are just two elements in an increasingly complex and crowded social media strategy for those seeking the presidency. "For a presidential candidate, they really should be everywhere people are," says Dave Kerpen, CEO of social media marketing firm Likeable Media. Updates on sites such as Twitter and Facebook are now expected, with savvy candidates also tapping into other areas such as LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram to reach potential supporters, he says. Constituents want news and information quickly, but to really be successful, candidates need to spread their messages through an open, conversational style, says Kerpen. "Speed is important of course," he says. "But more important than speed is authenticity and personality." The official Obama Twitter feed which has nearly 18.5 million followers vs. Romney's nearly 826,000 has mastered the technique of merging politics and the presidents personal life, says Kerpen. There are tweets from the campaign staff, as well as from the president himself, signed with the initials "bo."

For instance, on Aug. 9, Obama tweeted: "Congrats to the U.S. women's soccer team for a third straight Olympic gold. So proud. bo." On Saturday, the Obama Twitter feed tried boost his re-election effort by posting several negative updates about Ryan. Yet, Romney's campaign is also showing its social media savvy, says digital and traditional media advertising expert Barbara Sullivan. Republican candidates are often criticized for being "older and out of touch," she says. But the Romney camp showed it was "relevant" and "current" with its prepared efforts to get the word out about Ryan, she says, pointing out the social media efforts as well as the quick posting of web sites such as RomneyRyan.com. Yet, Romney did let some users down. Promotions for his app said "there's no telling when Mitt will choose his VP. But when he does, be the first to find out with Mitt's VP app." Yet, when unofficial news began to leak late the night before the formal announcement, Twitter users griped that they weren't the first to know. That's the challenging part about using social media, says Sullivan. Information moves quickly, and sometimes it can get outside of a candidate's command. "It's very hard to control these things," she says. Romney representatives didn't reply to e-mail requests for comment. As for the new vice presidential candidate, he has a robust social media presence. Ryan is active on Twitter and Facebook and has a Youtube page that is filled with videos of his media appearances. While personal information about Ryan is limited on the new Facebook VP page, his existing Facebook page, which was last updated Aug. 5, showcases many of his interests. It lists his favorite movies (The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and Monty Python and the Holy Grail), preferred music (Led Zeppelin, Grateful Dead, Metallica, Beethoven and Hank Williams Jr.) and favored activities (such as playing with his kids, bow hunting, mountain biking, skiing and reading.) Having an outlet to express political opinions, as well as personal interests, is particularly important during a time when there are so many negative political ads , says Jordan Rednor, partner at Be A Protagonist, a marketing strategy firm that works with brands and political campaigns. "People want to know who the candidate is," he says. "And with all the rhetoric being spewed, it's really hard to see the personality of the candidate." With social media updates, politicians have an "opportunity to come across in a much more friendly way and a much more appealing way," he says. "People want to know that their candidates aren't robots." POLITICO: Paul Ryan VP Pick Adds Social Media Muscle http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0812/79619.html Steve Freiss August 11, 2011

Mitt Romney didnt just get a running mate in Rep. Paul Ryan he inherited a robust, engaged social media apparatus that will be critical to volunteerism and conservative voter turnout. Ryan (R-Wis.) is an anomaly in the House. Hes a star politician who had more Twitter followers before Saturdays announcement than Republican House Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), and almost any other congressional figure save current House Speaker John Boehner and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The tea party groups who are crucial to the GOPs chances may be some of the most active, savvy online denizens in American politics. Romneys social media profile is broad but not deep, meaning he has a lot of followers almost 4 million on Facebook and more than 800,000 on Twitter but the enthusiasm and engagement expected from such a large audience was muted. With Romney, conservatives on social media were like, OK, we have to tweet about him once in a while, Facebook about him once in a while. But with Ryan, its going to explode, said Houston-based tea party activist David Jennings of the blog BigJollyPolitics.com. It kicks up excitement from the social media point of view. If it was *Ohio Sen. Rob+ Portman, say, you wouldnt have the reaction youre having this morning. It wouldnt be there. That influence is only bound to grow in the coming weeks. During his 16-minute rollout speech in Norfolk, Va., on Saturday, Ryans Facebook page which already boasted more than 100,000 fans, added 6,000 more. By contrast, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has just 31,000 fans. Ryans official Facebook page was growing so fast that it was on track to surpass Cantors Facebook following of 144,000 by early Saturday afternoon. The tea party in its many forms has been rather successful in using social media to raise awareness and mobilize followers, said Anthony Rotolo, digital communications professor at Syracuse University's iSchool. Ryan's connection to this audience may be an asset to the Romney campaign, particularly among conservatives that have been critical of his candidacy thus far. One reason Ryan has such solid social media standings is that he uses the technology effectively, said Amy Brown, a digital media strategist with Harris Media LLC, the firm that managed U.S. Senate candidate Ted Cruzs upset victory in the Texas Republican primary earlier this month. Engagement is critical to having a following that can be swayed to act on your behalf, Brown said. He has utilized YouTube to push his Path to Prosperity budget, he posts personal pictures on Facebook of his turkey hunting, he uses hashtags like #FullRepeal and uses the twitter handles of Speaker Boehner and Harry Reid to debate the issues, Brown said. His youth and continued straight talk on social media will be very successful. Rotolo pointed out that Ryan hadnt tweeted since Aug. 5, when he expressed remorse regarding the Sikh massacre in his home state of Wisconsin. That, however, could have been because he was in the final stages of being vetted. Lawmakers are careful not to use their official Twitter and Facebook accounts to campaign, so it is more likely Ryans campaign tweeting will mainly be found in the new handle @PaulRyanVP and the PaulRyanVP Facebook page, both of which the Romney team rolled out this morning. The Twitter account gained more

than 44,000 followers in its first three hours; the Facebook page was adding more than 300 new fans a minute by noon. It's already paying dividends and it hasn't even been the 24-hour cycle yet, said Dany Gaspar, director of digital strategy for Levick Strategic Communications, a D.C.-based crisis management firm. Romneys team saw how much that what Barack Obama did was able to propel the youth vote through social media. Ryan is someone who can possibly bring in the youth vote. Social media is the new grassroots forum in overall society and Paul Ryan has been in the forefront of that. The Ryan pick did point up a bit of a social media failure for Romney, too. For weeks, Romneys campaign hawked the Mitts VP smartphone application, promising to deliver the identity of his running mate first. In the end, some downloaders received the notification at about 7 a.m. Eastern time, more than eight hours after the news media had confirmed it was Ryan. In addition, not all the app downloaders received that notice, and as of an hour after Romney himself issued a press release naming Ryan, the app still showed a blurry photo of Romney with the tease: Who will be Mitts VP? Theres no telling when the announcement will be, so check back often and enable push notifications to get the exciting news before the press and just about everyone else (except maybe Ann). The Obama campaign had a similar snafu in 2008, when it promised to send text messages breaking the news of his vice presidential pick to people who gave their phone number. Some got the text in the middle of the night before the rollout, some received it days later and some never received it at all. Other folks who may have known: The Republican teams at Google and Facebook who help the campaigns place and create their ads. A Google search for Romney veep already yielded a paid link to Were For Romney Ryan that leads to MittRomney.Com. Publicists for both of those sites either declined to discuss that or did not respond to requests for comment. POLITICO: Mitt Romney Makes Most of VP App http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=E4ACDA9C-C40C-4C93-AA60-3AE24CA2A8DD Emily Schultheis August 9, 2012 Want to be one of the first to find out the identity of Mitt Romneys running mate? You can by downloading a specialized app and the Romney campaign really wants you to. Romneys campaign has launched a major online effort to promote and advertise its Mitts VP app, which will send users a push notification when the candidate makes his VP announcement. In the process, the campaign is capitalizing on the endless buzz surrounding some of the VP prospects to boost its digital outreach. Since users have to share their email address, ZIP code and phone number when they sign up, it could be a big new source of voter information for the campaign. Zac Moffatt, who runs digital operations for the Romney campaign, said the app, as well as the advertising push surrounding it, have gotten a great response so far. Relative to our other advertising weve seen, its a huge engagement rate, Moffatt said. The downloads and engagement have exceeded our expectations.

The Romney campaigns VP app is reminiscent of the way President Barack Obama announced Joe Biden as his running mate via text message four years ago. Its the latest in a string of mobile apps released by the parties and campaigns: the Obama campaign and the Democratic convention have both released apps, and the Republican convention is also planning to release one. The campaign launched the VP app, which is available on iPhones and Androids, late last month. In addition to alerting users when Romneys running mate is chosen, it also has a link to share thoughts on the pick via social media, and another link that takes users to the donations landing page on the Romney campaign website. The app is getting lots of promotion from Romneyland, but the campaigns advertising efforts around it are targeted to exploit the spurt in online attention surrounding a handful of politicians viewed as VP shortlisters. Since so many Romney supporters are already searching for political information on their mobile phones, advertising on a mobile platform is the most logical place for them to make that transition to downloading the mobile app, Moffatt said. On Twitter, the campaign is using promoted tweets that show up when users search for the names of VP prospects. #MittVP download the app and youll get the news first when the VP is chosen, a tweet bought by the Romney camp says, with a link to the site for the app. The promoted tweet shows up when users are searching for Tim Pawlenty, Rob Portman, Paul Ryan, Bob McDonnell, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal and Chris Christie. A Romney campaign declined to discuss its targeting strategy when asked by POLITICO if they were advertising around any other politicians names. Many of the campaigns ad efforts are specifically geared toward mobile users, given the audience of the app. When users search for Romneys name, or the names of several VP short-listers, on Google on their iPhones or Androids, the first result theyll see is a promoted link from the campaign. Who Will Be Mitts VP? Download Mitts VP App & Be the First to Know! the ads text says, along with a link that directs users to either the iTunes App Store on iPhones or Google Play on Android phones. This type of advertising is called mobile app extensions because it allows direct download of an app from the promoted ad. Facebook, too, is a tool the Romney campaign has been using to promote the VP app specifically. Selected users who open their Facebook app on a mobile phone will see a sponsored story in their news feed from the Romney campaign, also focused specifically on the VP app. The Facebook ad includes a photo of smartphones that have the VP app open and allows users to click a link to download the app and also to like or comment on the story on Facebook. The campaign is also advertising the app through Apples iAds, which places the ads on other iPhone apps.

Fox News: New Facebook Tool May Turn Friends Into Enemies http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2012/08/02/new-facebook-tool-may-turn-friends-into-enemies-fordemocratic-cause/ John Brandon August 8, 2012 Heres one you may not like. Imagine having a friend on Facebook who matches up your privately shared data to a public voting record -then flags you for more frequent campaign calls and contacts. Thats exactly what the Democratic party is doing. The upcoming presidential campaigns are eager to get their hands on the treasure trove of voter data that 900 million users have voluntarily posted on Facebook. Enter Social Organizing, a new tool developed by Democratic activist group NGP VAN. Using it, your friends can log in to Facebook and tell the service about you. You can then be added to a caller database, pinged for ads and harassed during the entire election. Many users think the information they post to Facebook cannot legally or ethically leave the sites confines, noted Roger Kay, a technology analyst with Endpoint Technologies. They may be in for a surprise. *Facebook+ was born on the idea of taking information about people and making it available to others With political information, this sharing has become a notch more like selling out your friends, Kay told FoxNews.com. 'With political information, sharing has become a notch more like selling out your friends.' - Technology analyst Roger Kay To use the tool, supporters log in at a campaign site. Social Organizing lets them connect to Facebook and locates friends. The supporter can then choose the relationship for those friends, such as co-worker or business partner. Supporters earn badges and points as they flag these friends. The data is then matched to voter records. For example, a supporter might have 500 friends, but the tool might know that 300 of those friends are already identified as donors or loyal to the campaign, based on voting record. The supporter can then focus attention on calling or e-mailing only the 200 friends who still need persuasion. President Obama tapped this company, which describes itself as the leading technology provider to Democratic and progressive campaigns and organizations and only works with the Democratic Party, to gather voter data in 2008. Stu Trevelyan, the CEO of NGP VAN, told FoxNews.com the company takes privacy concerns seriously. "Our application is in full compliance with the Facebook policy, and we take their policy and privacy seriously." He explained that the app only uses certain pieces of Facebook data -- first name, last name, city and state -- to match people with voter records.

The Facebook data just makes that process of identifying their friends on the voter file quicker, but this can also be accomplished without Facebook, with a name lookup" for example, he said. Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes declined to comment on the service. But the social networks platform policy does explain what information can be shared by applications: A user's friends' data can only be used in the context of the user's experience on your application." Some experts argue the tool might stretch or even violate those policies. Rob Enderle, a consumer analyst, says most people dont even know that their Facebook can be mined in this way, for example. They might not be aware that, when you friend someone on Facebook, you are giving them permission to use a tool like Social Organizing and that you might start getting more campaign calls. Social sharing became one step more sinister when commercial activity was introduced, the product of having to satisfy shareholders with respect to revenue generation, Kay told FoxNews.com. Facebook has a terrible record on privacy, he said. Trevelyan said the Social Organizing tool uses accepted practices: The voter record is public for each state, and it is a common practice for campaigns to mine this data. He says Facebook users can easily turn off private information such as data of birth or the city where you live. The expert advice: First, head to Facebooks privacy controls and make sure of how much youre sharing, and with whom. Then choose your friends wisely. In a way, this friend is using the relationship for political gain, and yet you might have any knowledge that this social mining is happening. Anyone can take information and match it with public information and sell the result to someone else, Enderle told FoxNews.com. It's perfectly legal and not even immoral. But those are not the friends you want. Enderle says this could be a polarizing problem for Facebook. Some users might start turning off more private info, not realizing that they have been giving campaigns fodder for the election. Done well it could increase dramatically the effectiveness of campaigns. Done poorly this could cause people to abandon Facebook in massive numbers. I expect the result will likely be someplace in the middle. Washington Post: Introducing the Issue Engine http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/post/introducing-the-issueengine/2012/08/07/0bdfddf0-e09b-11e1-a421-8bf0f0e5aa11_blog.html Ryan Kellett and Jeremy Bowers August 7, 2012 Which presidential candidate do you agree with on the issues most important to you? The Issue Engine is a place to learn where the presidential candidates stand and choose which candidate better represents your views. Our hope is that you take time to explore a few of the 18 most important issues of the election: Abortion, Afghanistan, Economy, Education, Energy, Environment, Foreign Policy, Government Spending, Gun Control, Health Care, Immigration, Iran, Jobs, Medicare, Military Spending, Same-sex Marriage, Social Security, and Taxes.

Here is a breakdown of the moving parts that go into Issue Engine: Facebook endorsements: After learning about the positions, we encourage readers to endorse a candidate using Facebook. By clicking on our endorse button, we prompt you to log in to Facebook and connect with our app. By connecting to the app and endorsing, you post your endorsement (and your optional reasoning behind your endorsement) on your Facebook wall according to your privacy settings. Take care in choosing your privacy settings, which can be adjusted for the entire app when you connect and on individual posts after you have posted your endorsement. If you explain your reasoning in a comment, we also post a copy of your reasoning with your name and Facebook photo to the Issue Engine page for that issue. Youll also notice that once youre logged-in, we also display who among your friends has endorsed a candidate. These are revealed according to your default privacy settings in Facebook. Developer Leslie Passante created a custom Facebook OpenGraphaction for this to allow readers to endorse a candidate. This is similar to the various other actions you might see in your news feed like the listen for Spotify or read in the WP Social Reader. Where you stand: On the right side, we help you track your endorsements on the issues. We also give you national polling data to help compare where you stand to America at large. These polls show who Americans trust more to do a better job on each issue. See the specific title of the poll, percentages, and date by rolling over each graph. Poll results are from Post-ABC polls among registered voters unless otherwise noted. Candidate statements: As part of learning about the candidates, we present statements from President Obama and Mitt Romney. Many of these are from speeches given by the two candidates. So far, we have ingested 568 transcripts, which are broken into 12,211 statement chunks. We looked for remarks going back to Jan. 17, 2010. You might notice that Obama has far more remarks than Romney. This is because he gives more public speeches and the White House distributes his remarks more frequently. So far, Obama has 11,226 statements and Romney has 985. Also note that many statements made by the president and the former governor dont apply to one of our campaign issues. At launch, only about half of the statements weve ingested do. The Issue Engine scrapes transcripts from the candidates Web pages. After weve saved a transcript, we break it down into statements -- usually a paragraph -- and then feed those statements into Washington Post Labs Trove personalized news service to apply concepts and categories. Finally, we map these Trove concepts and categories to a set of campaign issues that editors believe are crucial to the election. Later this week, the Washington Post will release access to the API and distribute the code that powers the Issue Engine. Until then, if you have questions about how the Issue Engine works, send us e-mail at opensource@washingtonpost.com. Also note that we have included our curated Fact Checker statements and their corresponding Pinocchios. Obama has had 28 statements fact checked and Romney has had 36. For statements that have not been fact checked, you may request a fact check. Issue Engine was built by:

Ryan Kellett, National Digital Editor Leslie Passante, Embedded developer Jeremy Bowers, Embedded developer Sarah Sampsel, Design Director St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Missourians Declare Political Support on Facebook with Brunner in Lead http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/political-fix/missourians-declare-political-supporton-facebook-with-brunner-in-lead/article_422316c4-e0ce-11e1-b9b8-0019bb30f31a.html Nicholas J.C. Pistor August 7, 2012 Yard signs are so 1980s. Now everyone declares their ballot box decisions on Facebook, and John Brunner is out in front. Today, as Missourians head to the polls, the three Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate are mobilizing their supporters on Facebook. And if "likes" are an informal poll of online activism, St. Louis businessman John Brunner is ahead. More people "like" John Brunner on Facebook than his two opponents, former Missouri Treasurer Sarah Steelman and U.S. Rep. Todd Akin. Facebook's U.S. Politics page featured the race today. As of this afternoon, Brunner had 22,328 likes (252 people liked a picture saying they voted for Brunner), Akin had 14,493 likes (and 144 people liked a picture saying they voted for Akin). Steelman had 6,913 likes. (Claire McCaskill, the Democrat who the GOP winner will face this fall, has 10,701 likes.) Traditional polls have shown Brunner ahead, but Akin has closed the gap (but not on Facebook). Social media sites like Facebook are a growing campaign tool where campaigns can target supporters and follow up with them to make sure they voted (the most important part of the electoral process). Brunner's Facebook page includes a video message from the candidate, and images reminding supporters to vote -- and then to tell their friends who they voted for. Todd Akin's page includes pictures of the candidate voting, and asking supporters to do the same. Sarah Steelman prominently features her endorsement from Sarah Palin. But will those "likes" translate to victory? We'll find out tonight. Venture Beat: The 2012 Election: Where Big Data Meets Politics http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/06/2012-election-big-data-politics/ Adam Hanft August 6, 2012 For generations, politicians have used the phrase My friends. Even Abe Lincoln would often refer to his listeners that way. Today, in the age of Facebook, that familiarity obviously takes on a whole new set of references. We are in the world of friends, of friends of friends, of one-and-two-degree connections. We are also in the midst of what the most intensely fought digital campaign in history. The 2008 election cycle will seem quaintly

primitive by comparison. Consider that in 2008, Facebook usage was just 5% of what it is today. Twitter was a mere zygote, Pinterest didnt even exist, and Big Data was pre-buzz word status. There is no question that Obama out-digitized McCain in the last cycle he out-raised him 3-to-1, and his messaging, targeting, online phone banking, and get-out-the-vote efforts were dazzling in comparison to McCains dial-up era lameness. That digital steamroller made Obama not just the hopeful option, but the sophisticated choice; a candidate whose modernity made him most likely to succeed at the complex economic challenges we faced. This time around, the digital divide between the candidates will not be as dramatic, although the president has some advantages, including the value of time. Consider that ObamaForAmerica.com has been up and running since 2008, while the Romney team has had to construct a digital team from scratch. (Well soon see how his executive chops manifest themselves in building an innovative and flexible digital organization.) To put that in perspective, on the morning of Election Day the website MyBarackObama.com the social offshoot of Obama for America, had collected an impressive 13 million addresses and just about four million individual donations. All of those supporters have been emailed regularly with fund-raising blandishments; some have said theyve done this to the point of backfire. And while the presidents poll numbers have waxed and waned, his Facebook page has exploded nearly six fold since he was elected. The media has been all over the electoral implications of the presidents digi-muscle. Politico has written about Obamas Data Advantage; The Guardian has celebrated Obamas Digital Wizards; and CNN postulates that Obamas data-crunching prowess may get him re-elected, rolling out buzzwords like data harmonization. What were witnessing in 2012 is the convergence of the Big Data phenomenon and politics. McKinsey has called big data the next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity for some very good reasons. The ability to process and mine terabytes of data, and use that to discern patterns, linkages and preferences is where the major candidates will truly demonstrate their digital props. Thats much more of a skill than merely targeting voters by obvious attributes such as age, gender, geography and website preferences. Segmenting voters with simple questions for example, if you regularly visit job sites (you care about employment), Web MD (youre likely 50+) or sites that aggregate farmers markets (you care about environmental issues) is kids stuff. What you need to recognize is that there are 15 terabytes of data added to Facebook every day; 10 terabytes can hold the entire Library of Congress. To scan that and turn it into actionable intelligence is a profoundly complex undertaking that requires a new, hybrid partnership between political strategists and computer scientists; the smoked-filled room meets the Red-Bull-fueled room. Thats not just a matter of analyzing your friends on Facebook and the people you follow on Twitter. Your friends may or may not reflect your political views and interests. Complex algorithms will need to be written to track and analyze how often you communicate with some friends versus others, to understand the nuances of your social graph, and to assess the books, movies and music you enjoy. Those need to be viewed in the context of your network and in a macro-framework as well, to understand what you care about and how to motivate you. Plus, influencers need to be identified, and it goes far deeper than a simple one-dimensional Klout score; someone with a low overall score might be incredibly influential in the world of Ohio parents of autistic

children. All this needs to be assembled, parsed, mapped against poll data on a real-time basis, and turned into targeted online marketing. Will this level of nano-understanding and precision targeting make the difference, as prognosticators are opining? I don think its that simple. The risk to both of the candidates is that digital sophistication doesnt automatically translate into convincing marketing. Online marketing can be exquisitely relevant, but its not really able to create big, bold powerful leadership brand and imprints. As many researchers have pointed out, most notably Drew Westen in The Political Brain, presidential campaigns turn on impressionistic perceptions of candidates that are created and fired up by deep neural associations. The web can activate those imprints, but it cannot create them. As a result, success will come from the artful synthesis of TV and traditional media which paints the pictur and digital, which fills in the dots. This elevates the complexity of managing a presidential campaign to new and challenging heights. The voter intelligence systems and targeting capability of digital marketing on the presidential level require skills that no campaign has had to manage before. And its not just a technological challenge for an organization that is new and untested. Its operational. Facebook posts, Tweets, emails and SMS messages will be ground out, relentlessly, to thousands of groups, sub-groups, and atomic-sized clusters. That campaign architecture, with tens of thousands of individual messages, means that its dangerously likely that something leaks out which is pathetically pandering or embarrassingly opportunistic. Weve seen sophisticated consumer marketing companies make huge mistakes because digital marketing can drive responsibility deep in into an organization where bad judgments find a home. In the rush to scale a massive digital organization, and in the competitive frenzy of a presidential campaign, the promise of digital can create a wave of beautifully targeted catastrophes. The Hill: Ted Cruz wins social media victory http://thehill.com/blogs/twitter-room/other-news/241643-ted-cruz-wins-social-media-victory Alicia M. Cohn August 1, 2012 Ted Cruz beat his Republican competition for the Texas Senate primary on social media before he beat him at the polls. Cruz, a former Texas Solicitor General, won the run-off primary election on Tuesday night, a victory that has been called a boost for the Tea Party movement. Observers have noted his social media strategy likely deserves some credit, too. Facebook's politics and government team on Wednesday offered political campaigns a list of seven tips for making effective use of the social media platform, and Cruz appears to have met all or nearly all of them in what his Facebook team is calling a "grassroots victory." Cruz was particularly good at leveraging social media in his campaign, likely due in part to his strong Tea Party support. The Tea Party movement has been noted for its use of social media tools since 2010, when grassroots activism helped Republicans sweep the House majority by electing a huge freshman class. Cruz likely got a major social media boost from supporters such as former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a star on Facebook since notes on her page are one of her favorite ways to communicate with supporters.

Cruz has more than 80,000 Facebook supporters and 27,147 followers on Twitter, huge numbers for someone not yet in national office. Cruz has been on both Facebook and Twitter since 2009. His social media campaign far out-paced that of his competitor, Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst (R). In comparison, Dewhurst has half the Facebook supporters, 4,364 followers on his personal Twitter feed and 6,330 on his official campaign feed, and has shared far less content and has been less consistent than Cruz on all platforms. In particular, Cruz's campaign did a good job meeting Facebook's engagement tips when it comes to consistency, interaction, multimedia and targeted ads. Facebook content can be particularly effective when friends share with other friends, so offering supporters a selection of "I voted for Ted Cruz" badges to use is an effective technique. He also used Facebook's Timeline feature to share many endorsements as they rolled in. Cruz even invited his Facebook fans to virtually join the celebration when he won on Tuesday night, live streaming his election night party on his website and sending out an invite on his Facebook page. ClickZ: Women and Swing State Visitors Big on Facebook http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/2175779/women-swing-visitors-facebook Kate Kaye May 17, 2012 Experian Hitwise released several data points yesterday about Facebook's audience in preparation for the social site's highly anticipated IPO, planned for Friday. The web measurement firm determined that one in every five page views in the U.S. happened on Facebook. In addition to other staggering traffic and timespent numbers, Hitwise revealed some factoids that should help marketers get a better grasp on the site's audience composition. Political advertisers will be interested to know 10 states, including 2012 battlegrounds Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina, account for 52 percent of visits to Facebook. California, Texas, New York, Illinois, Michigan, and Georgia complete the year-to-date list. "This represents the volume of traffic, so obviously the bigger states, the bigger areas tend to visit Facebook the most," said Experian Hitwise spokesperson Matt Tatham. Another way Hitwise measures traffic is by looking at where it's concentrated. "We're looking at concentration of traffic by people who are most likely to visit [Facebook]," said Tatham. Using that metric, Hitwise reported that users in several states including one other battleground state - Iowa - are more likely to visit Facebook than the online population as a whole, on average this year. Also on that list are West Virginia, Kentucky, Maine, Vermont, Arkansas, Indiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Alabama. Also, Hitwise found the New York City DMA provides the largest volume of Facebook traffic while the users in the Charleston, West Virginia DMA - a college town - are most likely to visit compared to the online population. And, while it doesn't match the huge gender gap on Pinterest, where some reports show upwards of an 80 percent female audience, Facebook does skew toward women, according to Hitwise. The firm said 56 percent of Facebook's audience are women.

Where does the largest volume of visitor traffic to Facebook emanate from? The New York City DMA, reported Hitwise. Keep in mind the Hitwise data "does not include all mobile traffic," which, if factored in could alter the numbers presented here. Some more Facebook U.S. audience data from Hitwise:

The site attracted 9 percent of all U.S. web visits in April 2012. Facebook brought in more than 400 billion page views this year and more than 1.6 billion page views per week. In April 2012, 96 percent of visitors to Facebook were returning after a previous visit. On average, users visit Facebook for 20-minute intervals.

Nielsen also has some recent Facebook stats. The measurement firm said in March time spent by U.S. users on Facebook averaged 7 hours. POLITICO: Ted Cruzs secret: mastering social media http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=0BC9A312-8A76-4517-B003-7BBF5AA4613D Steve Friess July 31, 2012 Ted Cruz announced his Senate run 18 months ago in an unconventional way emblematic of the campaign to come: on a conference call with Texass conservative bloggers. Then he tweeted it. Since then, Cruz climbed from obscurity to the brink of the years biggest upset and, in the process, became Exhibit A of how to effectively use social media to grow a movement. He currently holds a big polling lead over Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst in Tuesday's run-off for the GOP nomination. Ted Cruz is the Barack Obama of 2012, said Sean Theriault, a University of Texas at Austin political scientist. It is a great case study of using these tools in politics. For all the hype surrounding social media in campaigns, Cruz is among the first American examples of a dark horse candidate who rode to victory by tapping into the vast power of Facebook, Twitter, blogs and email. Whether he wins or loses Tuesday, the fact that he emerged as a serious contender thanks largely to a foundation poured online has even his opponents in awe. "It was like watching a tree grow," said Dave Jennings, a Houston-based Dewhurst backer who blogs at BigJollyPolitics.com. "You could see it work. I don't know who was the arbiter of all those decisions, but the social media the Facebook, all those Drudge ads, all of it was brilliant." Among Cruzs smart cyber moves: Weekly calls with supportive bloggers, who had access to the candidate throughout the race. Two full-time staffers focused on social media content, resulting in speedy responses to just about every tweet, Facebook comment and email. A microsite, cruzcrew.org, that empowered volunteers to take on tasks and print out campaign literature. The use of social media ads from the earliest days of the campaign to build a mailing list that is, in the words of Vincent Harris, the Cruz campaign digital strategist, "bigger than most of the failed Republican candidates for president."

This campaign was unique because digital wasnt done to check off a box, digital led until maybe a few months ago when fundraising made TV advertising possible, Harris said. I was on every call. I got all the access I ever needed. I cant recall ever getting turned down for a budget request. Cruzs team did what they could to make their Web following feel empowered. The bumper sticker art, for instance, was picked via an online poll. To be sure, Cruzs reliance on online strategy was a necessity given his dramatic financial disadvantage. The candidate had very little money until this spring, when his evident surge improved the fundraising picture. In the May primary, he nabbed 34.2 percent to Dewhursts 44.6 percent in a field of nine candidates, forcing Tuesdays runoff. A Public Policy Polling survey released Sunday showed Cruz had steamed ahead of Dewhurst by 10 points. Cruz lacked money, so instead he developed a network of online support that began with wooing the states conservative bloggers, many of whom put a prominent Bloggers For Cruz badge on their sites. The candidate and his surrogates have been active and responsive on Twitter and Facebook; on Monday alone, Cruz tweeted more than 20 times, mostly to thank users who wrote supportive messages. He has more than 25,000 followers on Twitter and 84,000 Facebook fans; Dewhurst has about 4,200 Twitter followers and 42,000 Facebook fans. Dewhurst was slow to deploy these methods, much to the frustration of supportive bloggers like Jennings. They kept talking about how theyve got the experienced guy and Cruz was inexperienced, but if the experienced guy isnt getting his message out, nobody is going to see it, Jennings said. I sat across the table from him and told him his team was letting him down. In the process, Dewhurst also came late to appeal to a powerful Internet force: The tea party. Cruz showed up at countless tea party rallies in 2011, nailing down grassroots support long before Dewhurst even tried. It is your pissed off, anti-Obama, pro-Sarah Palin voters who are the most active online, Harris said. Ted Cruz spoke to those people. On Facebook, the Cruz campaign sent city-specific status updates so that, for instance, only users in Waco would receive the update about Cruzs upcoming Waco appearance. Meanwhile, whenever Cruz appeared on national or statewide radio or TV programs, his campaign website would post a special splash page to specifically welcome the listeners or viewers who came there during or immediately after the show. The campaign also took advantage of the resources provided by Google and Facebook, both of which have dedicated Republican and Democratic staffers available to offer advice. As recently as this week, Harris said, the campaign deployed an idea provided to them by Googles Republican outreach guru Rob Saliterman. Hes been very active in this race, Harris said. When there was a debate, hed call and suggest we go up with search ads at the conclusion of the debate and raise money with messages fighting Dewhursts attacks. Facebooks GOP counterpart Katie Harbath, too, views the Cruz surge as an important case study. Cruz down in Texas is somebody who has really built up his page and really is doing a great engaging job, Harbath said. And hes up against a candidate who everyone thought was going to win because he had all the money. By the time Cruz had clear traction, he had converted local blogger support to support from Palin, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).

Dewhurst has been running for office for a long time, but the rules have fundamentally changed as to how people do that, said Theriault of the 66-year-old lieutenant governor, an elected official since 1999. Hes modernized a little bit, but he didnt realize theres been a revolution of how candidates speak to voters. The people who have surrounded and endorsed Dewhurst have the old campaign mindset. The Cruz people dont. ClickZ: Democratic Firm Ties Voter Data to Facebook Friends http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/2193630/democratic-firm-ties-voter-data-to-facebook-friends Kate Kaye July 24, 2012 This is turning out to be the year big political data. Democratic data and tech firm NGP VAN is unveiling a more robust edition of a tool connecting Facebook to its voter file data. The Texas Democratic Party has already used an earlier version of Social Organizing to reach Hispanic voters under 30 to get out the vote for the party's primary in May. The tool allows political groups on the left to find registered voters who are Facebook friends with supporters who log in to campaign sites via Facebook Connect. It's yet another example this election cycle of voter file data being put to use in digital environments. "We have the ability to leverage the social graph information that exists on Facebook for campaigns," said Stu Trevelyan, NGP VAN CEO. Facebook information that is then appended to voter file data is the property of NGP's clients, said Trevelyan. In some cases, a state party might offer local campaigns access to its NGP data. "We were trying to use it so [volunteers] could get used to it for the general election...to get the vote out," said Texas Democratic Party spokeswoman Rebecca Acuna. Party enthusiasts logged into the system and received lists of people in their Facebook friend network to call and remind to go to the polls. The initiative, part of the party's Promesa Project, was considered a test run for the general election specifically targeting Hispanics under age 30 in Texas who had never voted Republican, said Acuna. Phone volunteers encouraged people to come out and vote to support the Dream Act, which if passed would help undocumented youth become eligible for citizenship. "We think it has the potential to be a game-changer in elections," said Acuna of the platform. "People respond a lot more when it's their friends or family calling," rather than a random volunteer cold-calling a potential supporter, she said. Others who plan to use the NGP VAN system include Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat running for Senate, and Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, said Trevelyan. A key element of the platform is its segmenting capabilities, which pool Facebook friends of campaign supporters into various categories based on their profiles on the social site. Some might be labeled as potential volunteers or donors, others as persuadable through a phone call, and others not worth contacting because they don't appear to be sympathetic to Democratic causes or candidates. According to Trevelyan, NGP stores the Facebook ID when there is a match between NGP's voter file database and a Facebook friend of a supporter. Only information a supporter's friends allow the supporter to access on Facebook is available to NGP, he told ClickZ. "We can only match based on the info made available

to the supporter," he wrote in an email. ClickZ asked Facebook for comments on these points, which have privacy implications for Facebook users. "We take privacy concerns very seriously," said Trevelyan. "The FB IDs are part of the data owned by the client; NGP VAN does not own them," he stressed. "We do not transfer any IDs or user data outside our application." An earlier version of the tool was used by labor-backed group We Are Ohio in 2011, said Trevelyan. "Tens of thousands" of Facebook relationships were matched to NGP VAN's voter database for that campaign. According to Trevelyan, usually half of a volunteer's Facebook friends match readily with the voter file based on names and locations. Though the system arguably could be applied to inform ad targeting on Facebook it does not appear that any NGP clients have used it for that. The Texas Democratic Party used it to better target mobilization efforts leading up to the May 29 primary. Though Trevelyan said NGP VAN is not focused on using the platform to inform ad targeting, he said, "I think anytime people are connecting people's records with their profilesthat enables people to do ad targeting." The upgraded system also now has gamification elements, letting users score points for taking actions on behalf of a campaign, and displaying a leaderboard with the most active volunteers. On the right, Republican digital firm Engage ties volunteer activities to a game platform that awards them with virtual badges and real-life prizes for doing things like making phone calls or sharing information about a candidate on Twitter or Facebook. Ultimately, these systems are geared toward helping campaigns track volunteers to get a better sense of who their star volunteers are, and which messages resonate best with certain groups. An average state legislative campaign would pay around $350 to use the NGP VAN system, while statewide campaigns would pay more, based on the size of the organization or campaign, said Trevelyan. Technology Review: Facebook: The Real Presidential Swing State http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428530/facebook-the-real-presidential-swing-state/ David Talbot July 20, 2012 Facebook and Internet campaign strategies grew up at the same time. In 2003 and early 2004, when Facebook was a new dorm-room plaything, Howard Deans presidential campaign pioneered Internet fund-raising. By 2008, Facebook had crossed the 100-million-user mark and was coming to dominate online social networking; that year, Barack Obamas campaign wielded a custom social-networking site that helped win the White House (see How Obama Really Did It). A Facebook cofounder, Chris Hughes, helped build that site. Now, in 2012, Facebook is central to the upcoming presidential election. Both Obama and his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, are well aware that half or more of the electorate is on Facebook. Both campaigns websites are entwined with Facebook pages; visitors are encouraged to log in with their Facebook accounts and then post messages supporting the candidates for their friends to see. What Facebook also gives the candidates is an arena for testing, analyzing, and distributing precisely targeted political advertising. Both campaigns can also use Facebook to urge their supporters to vote and, potentially, to lobby their undecided

friends in swing states. That means this is where the 2012 election might be won or losteven if far more money will be spent elsewhere, especially on TV ads. Social organizing tool a Democratic Facebook app from NGP VAN Making use of social connections can lead to the ideal form of marketing: individual messages of persuasion delivered by trusted friends. You can see the presidents campaign reaching for this goal with Obama 2012, an app that his supporters can use to integrate their Facebook accounts with the campaigns website. The apps avowed task is to give people a quick and easy way to access the volunteering and organizing functions that worked so well for Obama in 2008. But the permission screen that comes with the app makes clear that it has another purpose as well. When I installed the app, I noticed that it said it would grab information about my friends: their birthdates, locations, and likes. Facebooks policies require that such data be used in only the context of the app itself, but even so, the campaign should be able to create tools that prompt supporters to approach voting-age friends in swing states and craft personalized appeals based on what the campaign can infer about those friends interests and views. Similar tools are coming from other quarters, too. In July NGP VAN, a company in Somerville, Massachusetts, that maintains a database on all registered U.S. voters and helps Democratic candidates access the data, released a Facebook app called Social Organizing. The app lets Democratic volunteers log in with Facebook and match their friends with voters in the database. Like the Obama app, NGP VANs makes it possible for candidates to execute a peer-to-peer persuasion strategy using Facebook. So dont be surprisedespecially if you live in a state that is considered up for grabs, such as Ohio or Floridaif you hear from an old college friend with a political pitch based on what the campaign thinks is important to you, as suggested by your Facebook data. If youve liked a page blaming Obama for high gas prices, you might be reminded about his pro-drilling positions. Dont be surprised if you hear from an old friend with a pitch based on what the campaign thinks is important to you. If youve liked a page blaming Obama for high gas prices, you might be reminded about his pro-drilling positions. The Obama campaign didnt respond to requests for an interview about its plans, but Joe Trippi, the Democratic strategist who pioneered Internet fund-raising for Dean in 2003 and 2004, expects that the campaign will use sophisticated methods to determine how and when to encourage peer-to-peer appeals in the final weeks of the race. Whats most important in terms of being able to reach people is to know not only that the voter is undecidedand also what issues, what is holding them up from crossing the linebut who their friends are in the network that might be able to talk to them, he says. And then get those friends the information that says, We need you to talk to your friend in Pennsylvania about these three issues that matter most to them. This is a field organizers dream. Certainly it is more than Trippi could have dreamed of as a $15-a-day campaign worker knocking on doors in Jones County, Iowa, for Senator Edward Kennedy in 1979, carrying shoeboxes of index cards indicating whether voters said they supported Kennedy for the next years Democratic presidential nomination. The Romney campaigns website also encourages supporters to log in using Facebook, but it requests permission only to view the individual users informationnot information about the users friends right now, says the Romney campaigns digital director, Zac Moffatt. The same is true for the Republican National Committees Facebook app. This may change, though, because the Republicans share Trippis view. I think

you will start to see, on our side, that app permissions will get changed, says a Republican digital strategist who spoke on condition of anonymity. Republicans are working on apps that take advantage of all the things in the Facebook social graph. How much information can the campaigns glean this way? Consider that the average friend count on Facebook is 190. As of early August, more than 150,000 people were using the Obama 2012 app. Multiply those numbers and you get more than 28 million people. Now, surely many friend lists overlap, and many of those people arent even voters. And some users block the ability of apps like Obamas to gather information about them when their friends install the programs (a Consumer Reports study, however, found that only 37 percent of users touch app settings). But even if these factors make 90 percent of Obama supporters friends useless to the campaign, the presidents campaign app would still have intelligence on 2.8 million American voters who didnt necessarily take any explicit action to share it. Persuading just a small percentage of those people could be crucial. In 2000, the contested election that put George W. Bush in office was determined largely by 537 votes in Florida, out of six million cast in that state. And in 2004 Bush beat John Kerry by fewer than 120,000 people out of 5.6 million who voted in Ohio. (Facebook is the virtual battleground within that battleground state. In 2012, just over five million account holders of voting age lived in Ohioout of a total voting-age population of 8.8 million, according to Well & Lighthouse, a Democratic consulting firm.) Given math like that, the right peer-to-peer and message targeting strategies could be the difference in swing states, Trippi says. Fast and on target In addition to any peer-to-peer strategies they might employ, the candidates are already waging online advertising campaigns that are more scientifically designed and demographically precise than the ones Obama and John McCain deployed in 2008. Political operatives can now rapidly test ad copy across multiple demographics, getting strategic insights within hours. They can even keep track of exactly which ads individual computer owners have clicked on. These abilities were brought to bear in an ad campaign that rolled out in March of 2010, when President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Actso-called Obamacare. The midterm elections were just eight months away, and the president was concerned for a vulnerable ally, Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate majority leader. On the health care issue alone, Reids online strategist, Jon-David Schlough, developed 18 sets of targeted advertisements for people in different demographic groups. For example, the version geared to students pointed out that the legislation would let them keep their parents insurance until age 26; the one for the elderly focused on what it would do to close a Medicaid benefit gap known as the doughnut hole. Then, for each of the 18 campaigns, different versions were tested on Facebook. Schlough says the site gave him access to a wide range of demographic groups, made it possible to place small ads at low rates, and offered easy ways to experiment rapidly with different combinations of headline, image, and text. The versions that generated the most clicks would get wider distribution on multiple websites. Eventually, the campaign could be sure that, say, an ad about being able to stay on parental insurance plans would be shown to a specific 25-year-old four times a day for two weeks. Its called nanotargeting, and its now a component of all campaigns, says Schlough, the founder of Well & Lighthouse. Political types are used to large data-set analysis on things like polling data and turnout data. But the fact that so much more data is available, so much faster, is allowing us to innovate a lot quicker.

For Reid, such innovations might have been decisive. Consider that his opponent, Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle, spent about as much as Reid and was ahead in the polls in the weeks leading up to the election. In the end, Reid won by more than 5 percentage points. MediaPost: Why the Race For the White House Goes Through Facebook http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/179114/why-the-race-for-the-white-house-goes-throughface.html#axzz2DjsxZJsh Rob Jewell July 19, 2012 Now that Mitt Romney is the clear front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, were seeing both Romney and Obamas campaigns ratchet up their advertising in an effort to reach male voters going into November. Historically, most of the political spend for a Presidential election would be for television ads, but with Facebooks enormous reach, it now exceeds that of both broadcast and print media. This should come as no surprise. Nearly 2.65 million cable and satellite TV subscribers have canceled their service since 2008 and now rely solely on Web-based services, e.g., Boxee, Apple TV, Hulu. Which means the general public, and men in general, are spending less time in front of the television and more time multitasking on the Internet. According to the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, there are only 58 million basic cable customers in the U.S. as of December 2011. During that same time period, Facebook claimed nearly 155 million U.S. users, totaling 52% of the population. Of that, 13.7% are males ages 18-20 years old, 17.5% are 21-24, 13.2% are 25-29, 10.2% are 30-34, 15.3% are 35-44 and 10.4% are 45-54, according to Facebooks data. Since Facebooks reach far surpasses that of broadcast and print media, why are politicians still investing their campaign dollars so heavily across print and broadcast outlets? President Obamas 2008 election campaign was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to leveraging social media, but it did underscore social medias potential to drive donations, virally seed campaign messages, sway voters and foster a sense of community and momentum around a candidate. As we will soon learn, there are myriad opportunities for both the Romney and Obama campaigns to effectively utilize Facebook to reach male (and female) voters. The fact is, Facebooks incredible targeting options (geo, demo, keyword, etc.), coupled with its massive worldwide usage volume make it one of the best venues for political campaign dollars. Facebooks robust demographic and interest-targeting capabilities allow campaigns to diversify messages to specific voter segments. This allows them to deliver messages to a male sub-audience based on their interests and background, not just sending out blanket messages to a larger demographic or geographic segment. The ability to hyper-target men via Facebook is a far more cost-effective approach to political campaigns than other media. This is due to the fact that ad spend is not being wasted on audiences that are disinterested in the content and delivery of the information. Engaging male voters by appealing to their specific demographic, interests and issues is key, and Facebook makes that easier and more effective than ever. But, more importantly, Facebooks hyper-targeting capabilities also make it more difficult for your opponent to track and monitor your campaign. For instance, if youre targeting young male voters on Facebook

between ages of 18-20 years old or fans of Ron Paul, your opponent or others in their camp most likely will not be able to see these ads unless they fall within those targeting parameters and lets be honest, what are the chances of that. With Facebook, not only are you spending ad dollars in the right places, but it is far more cost effective compared to broadcast and traditional media. Wisconsin Reporter: Romney Campaign Battling for States Youth Vote http://wisconsinreporter.com/romney-campaign-battling-for-states-youth-vote Ryan Ekvall and Kirsten Adshead July 18, 2012 WAUKESHA Conversations overheard while waiting for the start of the Fighting for Wisconsins Future Youth Event: unemployment, going away to college, the national debt, braces coming off, Obamacare, getting out the vote, and Facebook. Campaign workers with Republican party presidential candidate Mitt Romney say the dozen or so young people gathered Wednesday at the Waukesha County GOP Victory Center are part of a growing conservative youth movement and an important voting bloc if the Mitt Romney for President campaign hopes to win the 2012 election. About 18 million of the 24 million votes from voters 18 to 29 went to President Obama in 2008, which accounted for some 25 percent of his total, according to the Roper Center, an archive of political data at the University of Connecticut. This year, an estimated 8 million more 18- to 21-year-olds will be eligible to vote for the first time, said Obamas campaign manager, Jim Messina, in an interview with CNN. Several of the young Republicans in Waukesha said they got their start in politics volunteering for Gov. Scott Walkers recall campaign. That work may have paid off for Walker, who lost the typically liberal 18-29 by a slender 51-49 percent margin. Now they have committed themselves in some cases to 40 hours of volunteer work a week to dialing the phones and hitting the pavement for Romneys presidential campaign. In the fall, they intend to take their newly acquired campaign skills to their respective college campuses some in Wisconsin, some Illinois, one even from Boston College. The current economic times, the current outlook is not looking good, said Ricardo Tapia, a Milwaukee resident who will be a senior at Boston College in the fall. Tapia sounded more like an out-of-work 30something than a college kid. With the total debt being what it is, the deficit being what it is, the unemployment rate, the current scope is not looking good. Apart from that, my future is not looking good, he said. Tapia, 20, criticized Obama for his tax-and-spend policies, entitlements and failed hope and change rhetoric. He said unemployment was his biggest issue as a voter. Ive worked my rear end off in college and high school, and I dont think that may be enough these days. The 16.5 percent unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds reported in the June Bureau of Labor Statistics report is actually lower than the 17.3 percent rate reported in June of last year. In January 2009, however, that rate was only 14.9 percent.

Micah Voce, an 18-year-old who will attend Illinois State University as a freshman in the fall, echoed Tapia, saying unemployment and college loans were the most important issues to him. Well versed in Republican politics, Voce said he would like to work for a small business when he leaves college. Todays talk focused on using social media to engage friends and family in communicating Romneys message of reduced taxes and regulation. Romneys Wisconsin campaign team hosted Katie Harbath, Facebooks manager of public policy for Republicans; Facebook has Democrat strategists, too. Harbath said she helps campaigns attract more likes and, hopefully, votes. Obama has 27,373,952 likes on Facebook, dwarfing Romneys 2,479,738. (Facebook) is becoming widely important, mainly because this is one of the places that people check every single day and where they get a lot of their news, Harbath said. More and more campaigns are hoping to use that word of mouth and the power of word of mouth by people sharing content with their friends that the campaign is putting out, because it adds a level of trust that people wouldnt normally get with just a direct-mail piece, she said. Despite the presidents vast lead on Facebook, social media sites are no longer Democratic Party strongholds. Even young people have lost their monopoly on social media: Harbath said the 55-plus demographic was their fastest-growing group of users. President Obama put a lot of effort into (social media) obviously in 2008, said Harbath. But then you look at 2010, and thats where you started to see a lot of activity on the Republican side with candidates such as Marco Rubio, or Pat Toomey, Gov. Walker any of those folks who were running for office. When they first started, people didnt necessarily give them a chance at winning, but they really used social media early on to build up a foundational base of fans and people who wanted to vote for them. She pointed out Facebook has more users, 161 million in the United States, than voters in the 2008 presidential election, 122 million. In Waukesha, a largely Republican district, young Republicans might have an easier time persuading their peers to get out and vote GOP. The state as a whole, however, still seems to have more young Democrats than Republicans. A Marquette Law School poll conducted July 5-8 shows limited enthusiasm for Obama among young Wisconsin voters, but even less for Romney. According to the poll, 53.7 percent of respondents 18 to 29 approve of Obama, compared to 31.1 percent who like Romney. When asked who they would vote for in November, young voters were twice as likely to say theyd vote for Obama (61.6 percent) than Romney (31.1 percent). Among the entire population, 51.2 percent said theyd choose Obama, while 40.9 percent would vote for Romney. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.2 percent. For Obama, pretty much any candidate would be happy to win a group by 2:1, but if youre going to win 2:1 in a group that has the lowest turnout level, you want to do as much as you can to get them to turn out, said Charles Franklin, the University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist overseeing the Marquette poll.

I think from what weve seen of the campaigns so far, the jobs emphasis is probably still (Romneys) strongest suit, Franklin said. If he can successfully tie the slow recovery to the kinds of (limited) job prospects those who are 18 to 29 face then thats a very pragmatic argument. It would be difficult to win the group, but mitigating the loss would be in itself valuable, he said. Franklin said that, by contrast, Obama has values appeal, and young voters prefer the presidents social policies. An informal poll on the College Democrats of Wisconsins Facebook site seems to bear that out. Asked which one of President Obamas accomplishments is most significant to you? 23 respondents chose extending health care for young people compared to 14 who chose preventing an economic collapse and creating jobs. The College Democrats held a tweetup Sunday on Twitter to discuss organizing efforts for the upcoming fall semester. Among the tweets: The first step to winning this November is having conversations with the people you know and interact with in everyday life. Interested in talking about how @BarackObama has ensured equality for all by ending #DADT and supporting marriage equality. Congressman Ron Kind, D-3rd District, also tweeted to the group: #witweetup Your work on college campuses will be pivotal in western WI & important to the entire state. Thanks for being here. It was the same message the Republican Party was selling in Waukesha.

PR News: Election 2012: Sizing Up the Social Media Battle http://www.prnewsonline.com/free/Election-2012-Sizing-Up-the-Social-Media-Battle_16704.html Jamar Hudson July 18, 2012 In the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama became the first candidate to use social media as a campaign strategy focal point. To be fair, Twitter and Facebook, among other social networking sites, werent as prevalent in previous years as they were as the 2008 election was approaching. Nonetheless, Obama and his team maximized the use of social media to spread the message of change to the masses, particularly to young voters. Fast-forward to 2012 and youd be hard-pressed to find anyone without some sort of social media presence, politicians included. According to a recent study by the University of Texas, elected officials are using social media to announce political stances rather than promoting their campaign. The research also revealed that politicians are getting more comfortable with social media, with 98% of Congress using at least one social media platform and 72% using Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

So in this race between President Obama and presumed-Republican nominee Mitt Romney, when it comes to social media, yes, both campaigns are active participants. For both camps, an ineffective online strategy would be a recipe for disaster. As of July 17, Obama's official campaign Twitter handle (@BarackObama) had 17,579,880 followers on Twitter, compared to 663,586 for Romney (@MittRomney). In terms of reach alone, the edge clearly favors Obama as a single tweet can be seen by over 16 million more people than one Romney tweet can. On Facebook, Obama has 27,348,694 likes on his page versus Romneys 2,408,396. Both Twitter feeds are actually very similar. Posts read like prepared statements, and while each campaign is doing its best to present campaign facts and undermine the opposition, there is little to no interaction with followers. On Facebook the messages are more of the same. However, both candidates are effectively using the visual advantages the site provides: Romney with the upload your photo and stand with Mitt tab and Obama holding up a smiling baby in the cover photoa more personable approach for both. A recent CNN analysis found that Obama is spending twice as much as Romney on online advertising. Zac Moffat, Romneys digital director, told CNN that spending would ramp up as they got closer to the general election. But numbers aside, the fact that social media is a high priority in this election shows that both campaigns are keeping the American people front and center, says Marguerite Murer Tortorello, former special assistant to the president and director of presidential correspondence under George W. Bush, and current senior vice president, public affairs for PCI. While the Obama and Romney campaigns, along with their super-PACs, are spending astronomical amounts on advertising, the power of social media, which is largely a low-cost medium, has reengineered the political campaign landscape," says Tortorello, who advances advocacy initiatives through traditional and social media efforts. The campaigns are using their Twitter and Facebook strategies to convey authenticity and personality, without demonstrating too much polish in challenging economic times. As November approaches, both Romney and Obama will be looking for any possible advantage. The reach of social media provides limitless opportunities for their messages to reach voters, but the ultimate measure of success will be activating those likes and followers and getting them to the voting booth. Seattle Times: Wash. To Unveil Voter Registration on Facebook http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2018708721_apusvoterregistrationfacebook1stldwritethru.html Rachel LaCorte July 17, 2012 OLYMPIA, Wash. Facebook users in Washington state will have something else to brag about to their online friends: that they registered to vote on Facebook. The secretary of state's office said Tuesday it will have an application on its Facebook page that allows residents to register to vote and then "like" the application and recommend it to their friends. It's expected to launch as early as next week.

"In this age of social media and more people going online for services, this is a natural way to introduce people to online registration and leverage the power of friends on Facebook to get more people registered," said Shane Hamlin, co-director of elections. Washington state has had online registration since 2008, and since then, there have been 475,000 registrations or changes of address processed through the system. Washington is one of more than a dozen states that offer online registration. Hamlin said Washington state is the first to offer voter registration via Facebook. "We are excited that citizens in Washington state will be able to register to vote and review useful voting information on Facebook," said Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes. The state, Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which developed the application, have been collaborating on the project since last fall, Hamlin said. Once it's live, Facebook users can click on the application within the secretary of state's Facebook page. They'll need to agree to let Facebook access their information, which will be used to prefill their name and date of birth in the voter registration form. Users will still need to provide a driver's license or state ID card number to continue. Hamlin said that Facebook doesn't have access to the state's database; its page just overlays the application. Voters will also be able to access the state's "My Vote" site with specific information on candidates and ballot measures. Hamlin said that beyond giving Facebook permission to use names and dates of birth, voters don't need to worry about their personal information being collected by Facebook. "You are giving your information to us, not Facebook," he said. Slate: The Romney Campaign's Data Strategy http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/victory_lab/2012/07/the_romney_campaign_s_data_stra tegy_they_re_outsourcing_.html By Sasha Issenberg July 17, 2012 Once a week, members of Mitt Romneys political department gather in the campaigns Boston headquarters and pretend that they are in Barack Obamas war room. Such play-acting has been crucial to Romneys tactics since he secured the Republican nomination this spring. Shortly after preparing their own vote goalsthe state- and county-level accounting of registration, persuasion, and turnout targets that offer the basic strategic foundation of every campaignRomneys team drew up a set imagining what Obamas internal projections would be. In their weekly meetings, they review Obamas travels to identify the areas they think their rivals in Chicago are making a priority. At the same time, a new data-science team within Romneys strategy department sifts through reports on Obamas broadcast buys as assembled by the Campaign Media Advertising Group. Romney staff code each of Obamas ads according to their distinctive characteristics: content, style, the candidate attributes and characteristics theyre trying to driveeven the gender of the narrator and at what point the legally

mandated I approve this message tag is insertedalong with the perceived demographic audience and the markets in which it appeared. We watch where the president goes, says Dan Centinello, a Romney deputy political director who oversees the weekly meetings. Were trying to piece together what we think are his top ranks. That is easy enough, but Obama has not been traveling as a candidate for very long, so Centinellos team doesnt yet feel comfortable that they know how to interpret the logic of their opponents itinerary. Did Obamas recent Ohio bus tour stop in Sandusky because his analysts detected a large pocket of Romneyleaning voters they thought they could win over? Or because they thought an Obama visit was necessary to jolt their own supporters enthusiasm levels? Or did Obama go to Sandusky because advisers wanted to draw a crowd to aid local efforts to register new voters or enlist volunteers? In the primaries, Romneys advisers had little confidence that there was much logic at all behind his rivals moves, and the two-time candidate outmaneuvered analytically amateurish opponents with well-plotted discipline and attention to detail. Now forced to play catch-up against a savvy incumbent, Romneys team acknowledges they are not aiming to match what Obama has built in Chicago: A unique, in-house analytical empire that has developed an unrivaled capacity to churn through voter data and translate insights into tactics. Because of this capacity, Romney advisers assume that what they see the president doing in public must have a good deal of sense behind it. "The Obama team had the luxury of knowing exactly what they'd be doing on July 1, 2012 because they've been planning for six yearsdefinitely three-and-a-half years, says Zac Moffatt, Romneys digital director. So instead of devoting their analytical energies to out-strategizing the president, Romneys advisers are trying to hack Obamas code and turn it against him. As the dataset of Obama activity expands over the course of the campaign, the burden of finding those patterns will shift from the eyes of advisers huddled in weekly meetings to the statistical models theyve written. Algorithms will test the association between vote goals and the candidates travel and ad placement, staring through Obamas visible tactics to reveal a latent strategy beneath. Those calculations, along with other data from internal polls and the campaigns interactions with voters through field activity and phone contacts, feed into nightly simulations of local and state dynamics that spiral up all the way to electoral-college projections. Only then do Romneys aides believe they will know enough about how their dollars ought to be spent, and where their candidate ought to go. *** Throughout the primaries, competing as a well-known front-runner within a relatively small universe of potential voters, Mitt Romney gave his targeters one central task: identify his supporters so they could be mobilized to turn out. Romney demonstrated analytical acumen on the path to the nomination his campaigns ability to count votes in Iowa and savvy handling of the early-vote process in later states were both essential to his winbut he developed little institutional expertise along the way. Romney relied exclusively on his partys leading data firm, TargetPoint Consulting, to build the microtargeting models that undergirded those tactics and to advise him on assembling the universes of individual voters to be contacted by mail or phone. When Obama clinched the 2008 nomination he had more than 10 times the 89 paid staff on Romneys lean team when he extinguished Rick Santorums challenge this spring. The turn toward a general election has expanded the Romney campaigns analytical needs, while also refocusing them. The political department has instructed its field staff to be more aggressive in collecting information on people who attend Romney rallies so that targeters can build models to predict not only how a person will vote, but their likelihood of attending campaign events or agreeing to volunteer. While the political department is developing a plan to use those volunteers for get-out-the-vote activities this fall, the

campaigns targeters are more concerned with finding minds to change: those already likely to vote but still not sold on Romney. The challenge is finding that share of persuadables that are out there, says TargetPoint president Michael Meyers. How do I find them and what do you talk to them about? When nominee Obama found himself in a similar position four years ago, his campaign decided to upend the standard structure campaigns used to interact with data. Obama had begun 2007 relying exclusively on an outside consultant, Ken Strasma, to develop his statistical models. But as the general election arrived, the campaigns ambition for using data exceeded the reach of Strasmas small firm. Expertise was no longer so centralized: by the end of the primaries dozens of employees had worked directly with Strasmas microtargeting scores to build targeting universes and organizing maps, often improvising to solve local problems. That June, campaign manager David Plouffe approved a proposal to augment Strasmas work by having staffers direct regional data and targeting desks at Obama headquarters. In Chicago, targeting and analytics would be treated as a core internal campaign function, like press relations or constituency outreach. John McCain stuck to the old model, hiring outside consultants (largely through the Republican National Committee) who struggled throughout the summer to get the attention of campaign leadership. Those targeters had to wait until August to begin to building their state-specific statistical models that generate probability scores for individual voters. In nearly all of those states, McCains campaign never updated those scores, even as the dynamics of the race changed through such heady disruptions as Sarah Palins nomination and the collapse of Lehman Brothers. While McCains campaign treated microtargeting as a one-time process, Obama made it nearly continuous. Targeting-desk staffers processed the results of hundreds of thousands of weekly voter interviews placed by Obamas call centers. Starting that summer, they remodeled the electorate in every battleground state each weekend, so that when Palin arrived on the scene or the global-financial system collapsed field staff could see the events impact on the projected behaviors and beliefs of every voter nationwide. That remains the blueprint for Obamas 2012 data structure, with dozens of analysts spread among departments in Chicagosome assigned to specific regions and states and others available to work on special projects, such as the text-analytics initiative called Dreamcatcherand no dominant outside analyst like Strasma under contract. Innovation to improve their strategy and tactics, Obama campaign officials have gambled, should come from within. Even as Romney now reaches fundraising parity with Obama, his campaign isnt aiming to duplicate Chicagos analytics structure. A reliance on staff talent, Romneys advisers caution, could potentially prevent a campaign from benefitting from ingenuity elsewhere. The other side has certainly invested a lot of money, says Meyers, but theyve been operating outside the market for two years. Meyerss TargetPoint, which works for a variety of campaigns and independent groups, including the pro-Romney super PACs Restore Our Future and American Crossroads, will handle the majority of states for Romney. The remainder have been assigned to Grassroots Targeting, its leading competitor among Republican data consultants. Already Romney is moving more quickly than McCains did four years ago. His campaign began assigning its scores this June, and engineered systems so that new information from Republican field canvasses and phone banks can help to refine the statistical models on an ongoing basis. Its getting a lot faster and a lot more dynamic, says Alex Lundry, a veteran of the McCain effort and perhaps the most methodologically sophisticated opinion researcher working in Republican politics. Lundry recently moved to Boston to work for Romney full time, charged with leading a data-science team within the campaigns strategy department. No longer competing in a few states at a time, strategists now

need to make continuous determinations about how to move resources across a national map, and balance different tactical needs in each state. Lundry has been paired with Brent McGoldrick, who oversaw George W. Bushs 2004 West Virginia operations but eventually left campaigns to join Financial Dynamics, a consultancy that works with clients in the health care, energy, and financial-services sectors to segment consumers by their attitudes and behaviors, and adjust corporate advertising strategies to better reach them. Lots of us, including myself, have always done politics, says Blaise Hazelwood, who launched Grassroots Targeting with McGoldrick in 2005. He has had the time to experiment with all this. In politics you dont typically have that type of opportunityor not with the time or budget to do it. Romneys digital department has gone on a summertime personnel spree, hiring former employees of Apple, Google Analytics, Ominture, andin the case of the new manager of Romneys online store Overstock.com. (A cluster of newly hired engineers have been permanently situated in Utah, partially to exploit the time difference when working on overnight projects.) But the bulk of the online analytics come from commercially available services marketed by outside firms. Web ads are largely directed through segments packaged by the company Lotame based its own online-behavioral models. Other vendors have been enlisted for their boutique products, as ClickZ has reported: Pulpo for profiles of Hispanic sub-segments online, and Say Media for online video targeted at voters who do not watch much television and are hard to reach through traditional ads. "I don't think we thought, relative to the marketplace, we could be the best at data in-house all the time, says Moffatt. Our idea is to find the best firms to work with us." It is a sentiment that aligns with the candidates own private-sector triumphalism, but more importantly reflects the Romney campaigns acceptance of the David and Goliath dynamic between Boston and Chicago where analytics are concerned. Romney aides scoff at the glowing pieces written about Obamas data-driven methods, but their obsession with reverse-engineering his analytics is its own concession. It is the statisticians version of trailing a motorcade in a honking bus to find out where the president is headed, in the hopes of later divining why. Its one thing to know ours, says Centinello, but its even better to know what his strategy is. POLITICO: The Duo Inside the Facebook War Room http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0712/78497.html Steve Friess July 14, 2012 When President Barack Obama's campaign wants to put out a new message on Facebook, it often calls up a Democratic strategist who sits two feet away from a Republican who does the same for Mitt Romney. It's not the world's most impressive war room just two people in Facebook's F Street office with graffiti and exposed wires. But it is the place where any candidate, many far less savvy than the presidential campaigns, are trying to harness the power of this whole "social networking" thing they hear so much about. It's a smart business move for Facebook: cash in on a divided Washington by playing to the insecurities of both sides. Campaigns don't want their secret digital strategy revealed to the other side, so Facebook will ensure that a bona fide Democrat or Republican will handle their most sensitive requests. "There's a natural trust issue: Republicans don't trust Democrats. I don't trust Democrats with how I spend my ad dollars," said Vincent Harris, owner of Harris Media LLC, who ran the digital campaigns for the GOP presidential bids of Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich.

The two strategists are Democrat Adam Conner, 27, and Republican Katie Harbath, 31. Conner's desk has a Daily Kos water bottle and Harbath's has her framed autographed photo of the Young Guns Reps. Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy. Conner was on the Kerry-Edwards campaign in '04, and Harbath was the chief digital strategist at the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Now theyre unlikely teammates, answering a constant stream of calls and emails from everyone from presidential campaign consultants to small town mayors. If the question is technical, either one can walk them through Facebooks tools from timelines to targeted ads. But if its politically sensitive, the candidate or campaign can work with a fellow partisan to help tailor messages to constituents and voters. As Facebook's power and reach grows, campaigns are looking to harness expert strategy on how to use that treasure trove of data volunteered by users, from the obvious (age, gender, ZIP code and political affiliation) to the more nebulous (TV show preferences, hobbies, organizational affiliations). Such information can help target partisan messages to voters. Candidates can be shown, for instance, how to promote themselves on the walls of people who have "liked" their opponents, or a message can be tailored to, say, unaffiliated voters who express an interest in women's health topics. It works because, importantly, Conner and Harbath don't share their campaign confidences outside the office. In fact, if one is not available, campaigns can consult with the other, and both say they try to help in a nonpartisan manner. (Harbath and Conner don't actually sell the ads; Facebook has a sales staff, including some who focus on politics, for that.) Obama 2008 digital campaign chief Scott Goodstein said there's always risk in this sort of dealing but "at least you have a little bit better chance that Adam's not going to call up a Republican and say, 'The Democrat just bought X amount of ads, you better double up.' The fact that Katie and Adam sit six feet from one another? What am I gonna do? If I want to play around on their network, I have to trust." Harris has the same approach, but from the other side of the spectrum. "Does Adam know what I'm buying? Sure. I might go to him to say I'm spending $100,000 and this is who I want to reach, but I'm not going to bare my soul to someone of the opposite party," he said. It's very different with Harbath. "Katie and I had a conversation before the Iowa caucuses when Perry was trying to win over evangelicals, and she suggested one way to reach those voters was to advertise on the Facebook wall of alumni from Christian universities in Iowa," Harris said. Under most circumstances, Conner and Harbath would not be working together. But they're real-life "friends." The duo, who sat for a rare joint interview with POLITICO last week, comprise Facebook's entire staff designated to help candidates and officeholders use the tools the site has to offer. In fact, until last year that "staff" was simply Conner until he suggested the Harbath hire knowing GOP demand was about to skyrocket. "We knew the 2012 cycle was coming down the pipeline and there were going to be a lot of Republican presidential candidates that we need someone to work with," said Conner, who served as an aide with the House Committee on Rules before joining Facebook in 2007.

Still, the arrangement is unusual. Many companies have in-house lobbyists of various political ilk to cover their bases on the Hill. But Conner and Harbath are both veteran political operatives for their sides who are privy to strategy the timing, size and messaging in each online ad buy that opponents would love to access. In fact, in many cases they're the ones providing ideas for how to tactically place campaign messages or donation pleas for maximum effect. As recently as last week, for instance, staffers for Campaign Solutions, a top Republican digital campaign firm, were in constant contact with Harbath to prepare how candidates would react in Facebook advertising depending on how the Supreme Court ruled on the Affordable Care Act, the firm's CEO Becki Donatelli said. "My team talks to her almost every day," said Donatelli, whose company is managing Web strategies for hundreds of clients this year and led former GOP presidential contender Michele Bachmann's online effort. "I trust that what we talk about is not going to the other side of the aisle to be used by the left." Conner and Harbath have an easy, perhaps unlikely, rapport with one another for people who have long toiled on opposite sides of issues. He hails from Los Alamos, N.M., and half-joked that he was seduced into Democratic politics by the idealism of "The West Wing." She's the daughter of a Green Bay, Wis., paper mill executive who describes herself as a "middle-of-the-road Republican" ever since she watched President George W. Bush's rousing address to Congress following the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Among her bona fides: She first developed gop.com for the Republican National Committee in 2004. "Katie has her opinions as I do, and she's passionate about them, as I am, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to change her mind," Conner said. Harbath agreed: "Here in the office, we're so busy helping with Facebook and helping getting people on board, that it's a common goal. It's not something where there's people fighting at all, back and forth, or getting into any sort of heated debates." In fact, they have a common mission to modernize campaigning for both parties. Despite the inflamed rhetoric especially via the Internet that is a byproduct of today's polarized politics, partisans among digital consultants have found it far easier to get along than other segments of the body politic. "You don't understand what it's like until you've had to go through the campaign manager who doesn't get it or the chief of staff who doesn't quite understand technology or the levels of approval you have to go through to get an email sent out," Conner said. "It's great that they have divided it up along partisan lines because it creates a relationship of trust so that I can call Adam for advice and not be concerned that it's going to make it across the aisle to the other side," said Stephanie Grasmick, whose firm Rising Tide is working this year with several Democratic gubernatorial and senatorial candidates. The tools to advertise on Facebook are fairly straightforward, but consultants say it takes someone with intimate knowledge of the medium to divine formulae for speaking to specific segments of voters. Much of Conner and Harbath's jobs are less glamorous than brainstorming how to speak to independents, though. They jointly helm training sessions for Hill staffers to explain how they might use new Facebook tools in governing and trot the nation to evangelize for the site at an endless number of political gatherings.

Conner just returned from Netroots Nation in Providence, R.I., for example, while Harbath was in Las Vegas for RightOnline. Considering how small a piece of Facebook's business politics is, it's remarkable that Conner and Harbath make themselves available to candidates of pretty much any level. Take, for instance, the case of Mayor Mel Pennington of tiny Hartsville, S.C., last week. Pennington had hit the maximum 5,000 Facebook friends and had to transition from a personal page to a fan page, where he could have an unlimited number of users. Yet in the process, he deleted his own access as administrator and couldn't read, much less respond to, resident emails sent through the site. Pennington became frantic. He called Facebook's Palo Alto headquarters, emailed the help desk and took to Twitter to beg tech-savvy Newark Mayor Cory Booker and, repeatedly, even Mark Zuckerberg himself to intervene. Eventually, he called the office of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) whose staff suggested he contact Harbath. His access was restored within the hour. "I'm pretty sure having met her it's going to change my life politically for the better," Pennington predicted. Washington Post: Romney Advisers, Aiming to Pop Obamas Digital Balloon, Pump Up Online Campaign http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/romney-advisers-aiming-to-pop-obamas-digital-balloon-pump-uponline-campaign/2012/07/13/gJQAsbc4hW_story.html Philip Rucker July 13, 2012 Boston Two blocks west of Mitt Romneys headquarters here, his campaign has opened a new front. Since clinching the Republican nomination two months ago, Romney advisers have significantly stepped up their digital campaign, hoping to catch up with President Obama in an arena he dominated in 2008. Romney has hired data analysts and mobile-app developers from places including Google and Apple, unwilling to concede the traditionally liberal-leaning Silicon Valley talent pool. Romney aides acknowledge their online and mobile efforts are unlikely to surpass Obamas in scale. The presidents reelection campaign spent $26 million on online advertising through May 31 far more than Obama had spent at this stage in 2008, when he was revolutionizing the use of technology in politics, and at least four times more than the Romney campaign. By one measure, Obama delivered more than 800 million paid Internet ads in February alone six times more than the entire Republican primary field. Yet even if they are destined to be outspent and outmanned, Romneys advisers contend that they can outsmart their counterparts in Chicago in a few important ways including engaging their supporters online more intensely than Obamas campaign is mobilizing his, and using digital data to identify and woo independent voters in the narrowest demographic groups in states where a few percentage points could decide the election. A number of private-sector consultants and past Obama advisers say the technological playing field is leveling.

They both have an infinite amount of money. They both are doing roughly the same things. I dont see any reason to believe why they wont be even on the technology front, said Jim Gilliam, a founder of NationBuilder, a tech firm that helps political candidates build social networks. In certain respects, the two campaigns efforts mirror each others, at least on the surface. Both have interactive, dynamic Web site home pages as well as state- or issue-specific pages. They both churn out a flurry of campaign propaganda videos, tweets and informational graphics and have online stores selling schwag, such as T-shirts and bumper stickers. Both also have sophisticated advertising campaigns built around search terms on Google and YouTube. And they have successfully mobilized partisans to make online donations at important moments for Obama, his decision to support same-sex marriage; for Romney, the Supreme Court ruling upholding Obamas healthcare law. Still, there are differences. On Facebook, where the campaigns can interact with supporters and extract valuable information from them, Obama has 27 million supporters, while Romney is far behind with just 2 million. The Romney campaign is building advantages, however. Where 5 percent of Obamas fans are engaging on Facebook at a given time for example, by liking, commenting on or sharing a post or a video 32 percent of Romneys are engaged. Another difference: Where Obamas campaign has engineered its digital products in-house most notably, a dashboard that debuted in spring and enables supporters to connect with the campaign, keep up with news, volunteer and give money Romneys campaign is outsourcing much of its development work to private-sector digital firms. Romney advisers contend that by turning to outside engineers, they can tap into fresh innovations in the free market and glue them together in Boston. Its the hubris of the Obama campaign this belief of, Trust us, we know best, said Zac Moffatt, the Romney campaigns digital director. I disagree with that. I believe the marketplace is smarter. ... We dont want to create the next Google. We want to leverage Google to be better to win the presidency. Making light of the competition, Moffatt quipped in a recent interview, I dont think IBM wakes up every morning and thinks, How do I get in touch with Obamas data scientist? And he tried to pop what he sees as the Obama digital balloon. What makes them the best? Moffatt asked. Because theyve told you theyre the best? ... Have you ever actually used BarackObama.com on your iPhone? It doesnt meet the user experience expected from a team that has been planning for four years. It has 37 things drop-down just in the menu bar. Romneys mobile app has had issues, too. It initially misspelled America in Romneys slogan on the title page; the campaign corrected the typo. Romneys advisers are trying to debunk the idea that the tech community broadly supports Obama. The start-up entrepreneurial world is less all-Democrats, all-the-time than youd think, Moffatt said, noting that he traveled to Silicon Valley last month to meet with entrepreneurs at Google, Facebook and Twitter.

Moffatts evidence: his growing team. The Romney campaign had 87 staff members when the primary campaign ended two months ago. Today, Moffatt has more than 80 staff members in the digital department alone. The team was annexed from campaign headquarters, taking over the second floor of the brick building a couple of blocks away that houses the Massachusetts Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission. Romneys digital army sits at long tables and toil on laptops and iPads, taking occasional breaks lounging in beanbag chairs. Against one wall are the bikes they ride to work; tacked to another, enlarged maps of general election battlegrounds such as Ohio, Iowa and Nevada. There are similarities to Obamas vaunted team of Web wizards. That is what Romneys advisers say they want people to see. In 2008, when the Obama campaign was building its social network to enable volunteers to organize themselves and donate, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the Republican nominee, had just four digital staff members and paid little attention to the emerging technologies. There was no GOP digital road map for Romney to inherit, so Moffatt a 32-year-old whose first campaign was New York Mayor Michael Bloombergs 2001 mayoral race and learned to crunch behavioral data on President George W. Bushs 2004 reelection campaign charted one. The Romney campaign, like Obamas, has been studying consumer behavior to target voters who might not see television advertisements. It commissioned a poll of voters in Florida and Ohio to see how many watch television and, for those who dont, what kind of Web sites they frequent. Moffatt wont say what the poll found Thats the secret sauce, he said but his digital analysts are tailoring marketing schemes to reach them. Moffatt is particularly dismissive of the Obama campaigns Facebook efforts, repeatedly accusing the Obama campaign of touting vanity metrics, such as its 27 million followers, when so few of them are engaged. They are constantly promoting vanity metrics not actionable metrics, he said. It is like going to the gym just to work on your biceps. The Obama campaign declined to comment, citing a policy not to publicly discuss digital strategy. But privately, Democrats close to the campaign were critical of the Romney efforts. They said Obama has a larger proportion of small-dollar online donations than Romney. And regardless of engagement statistics, they said, Obama remains solidly ahead of Romney in net supporters on Facebook. They said both metrics were indications of Obamas superior grass-roots organization. Romneys campaign officials do not deny Obamas advantage. Because of the sheer volume of Obamas Facebook fans, every adult American on Facebook there are about 160 million of them, according to Facebook can be presumed to be friends with an Obama fan. That means Obamas messages could wind up on the Facebook timelines of virtually everyone. The Romney campaign had a major test of its catch-up effort late last month when the Supreme Court ruled on the Affordable Care Act. In the 72 hours after the ruling, Romney launched about 60 different initiatives to reach out to supporters online, either with videos or display advertising or tweets.

Over those three days, Romney raised more than $6.7 million online from more than 70,000 donors, Moffatt said. About 70 percent of them were first-time donors, he said, creating a new pool of supporters to tap down the road. The average donation was less than $100, and the median $25. Perhaps more important, in the Romney campaigns core states, where it has field staff, supporters were 60 percent more likely to be engaged online than in nontarget states. In Florida, for instance, 38,000 people interacted with Romneys Facebook page Thursday, Moffatt said. This even surprised some Republicans. We didnt necessarily think, until the health-care decision last week, that there would be a grass-roots outpouring for Mitt Romney. It wasnt the style of the campaign or the candidate, said Patrick Ruffini, a GOP digital strategist. Now, he said, President Obama could be in a good deal of trouble financially and organizationally. PBS: An Election on Facebook: Old Media Enters the New World http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/july-dec12/election_07-12.html July 12, 2012 JEFFREY BROWN: And now back to this country and to presidential politics. Ray Suarez returns with that. RAY SUAREZ: And we continue our regular look at the campaign as it plays out in social media and on the Web. For that, we're joined again by two journalists from the new website, Daily Download. Lauren Ashburn is the site's editor in chief. Howard Kurtz is Newsweek's Washington bureau chief and host of CNN's "Reliable Sources." And this week, both Mitt Romney and Vice President Biden spoke to the NAACP. Did it garner much traffic in the online world? LAUREN ASHBURN, Daily-Download.com: Absolutely. Our traffic, Twitter and Facebook feeds were lighting up. HOWARD KURTZ, Newsweek/CNN: Particularly, Ray, after Mitt Romney was booed yesterday at the NAACP convention. The initial wave was sort of one of mockery. And one MSNBC host -- this was widely re-tweeted or sent out -said that he was deliberately booed because he wanted to appeal to white racists. But then there was sort of a counterwave of conservatives defending Romney And taking issue with the somewhat discourteous behavior of some of the NAACP members, who after all had invited the presidential candidate. RAY SUAREZ: This was all civilians trafficking this image on their own, or were the campaigns also interested in getting this out there? LAUREN ASHBURN: The majority was civilians, I think, very upset with what happened.

HOWARD KURTZ: But some journalists and activists who also tend to join these online conversations. RAY SUAREZ: Now, this week also, Facebook very handy for finding out how your high school girlfriend has aged... (LAUGHTER) RAY SUAREZ: ... snarky aphorisms and vacation pictures, they're teaming up with conventions. Why would political conventions want to partner up with Facebook and vice versa? LAUREN ASHBURN: Well, I think that television networks and other organizations are interested in partnering with Facebook to cover conventions because it brings a younger demographic, number one, and number two, that it lends some... HOWARD KURTZ: The hipness factor is what you're looking for. LAUREN ASHBURN: Hipness, yes, that's it, to organizations that may be seen by the younger demographic as not with it. HOWARD KURTZ: And that's why we have news this week that Facebook is partnering with CNN in a number of ways for this political campaign, which obviously CNN hopes will drive traffic online and create its social -augment its social media presence. And you have a... (CROSSTALK) LAUREN ASHBURN: Yes. I have a graphic right here showing the campaign partnership. And there are several different components to the partnership. The first is what's called an I'm Voting app for your phone and also for your laptop, where you can put the information in specifically of who you are voting for on your Facebook page. HOWARD KURTZ: You're essentially announcing to your friends that you're with so and so and maybe spreading the word on behalf of that candidate, because Facebook is a social place. And as well, there is a survey state by state also of demographics around key events on the political calendar, conventions, Election Day, debates. And Facebook also is measuring what it calls buzz, which is another way to saying aggregating the amount of discussion around Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and whoever Romney ends up picking as his running mate. RAY SUAREZ: A lot of old media, legacy media, is partnering with online and social networks. What do they get out of it? Because a lot of these places have their own Web presence. Aren't they picking their own pockets by trying to also be present and get their content distributed on Facebook? LAUREN ASHBURN: I think that the Internet, the more you share on the Internet, the more robust your site becomes. So I think that by partnering with these organizations, for the Internet, it's a very common practice, maybe for the older organizations, not so much.

HOWARD KURTZ: And we see that with the NewsHour having its own partnership with MTV in an attempt to reach younger people, who do spend a lot of time hanging out online. RAY SUAREZ: Now, have there been any measurable effects? OK, everybody's doing all this stuff. (LAUGHTER) RAY SUAREZ: Have the presidential campaigns noticed that they're getting noticed because of this new way of announcing themselves? LAUREN ASHBURN: Yes. I spoke to the CEO of VoterTide, an organization that tracks social media. And they have seen a huge Facebook surge over health care. If you looked here at the graphic that I'm putting up here from them, on June 28... HOWARD KURTZ: Which of course is the day of the Supreme Court ruling on the president's health care plan, upholding its constitutionality. LAUREN ASHBURN: ... we had a Facebook surge in likes for Mitt Romney, almost up to 40,000. So you had a significant like factor, likability factor, because he tweeted out information about health care and other people Facebook-posted it. HOWARD KURTZ: Obviously, conservatives, Republicans, Romney fans energized by the Supreme Court upholding a law that they frankly despise. And if you go to the next graphic that we have, President Obama the next day after the high court ruling got a surge in not Facebook likes, but in Facebook shares, because his speech to the country claiming victory over the Supreme Court ruling included -- they put some music to it and some nice graphics. And that was shared, what, 40,000 times on Facebook? LAUREN ASHBURN: Yes, more than 40,000 times. And that's just one video. And if you look at this chart, all of these other points here are the release of different videos. So this one particular issue was able to garner that many shares. RAY SUAREZ: Now, if you go on Facebook, if you have any number of friends, you're constantly being urged to like things. (LAUGHTER) RAY SUAREZ: And it's done with the stroke of a key. It doesn't ask for much from you as far as commitment. Can it translate into something real, like campaign contributions or votes? HOWARD KURTZ: I think Facebook has become a galvanizing force, certainly in the media world. And I think it wants to become a galvanizing force in the political campaigns. Facebook has had other partnerships with ABC, with Politico. And so, with so with so many people trusting their friends and liking things online and making statements and kind of living their lives online, I think

Facebook is becoming a real force, in part because it has such great reach, so many people now, some hundreds of millions. LAUREN ASHBURN: And Facebook -- Facebook is really now the grassroots campaign of this election. People now are going to Facebook to see what their friends are doing and how they can join in. And at the end of the videos, for example, that Barack Obama posted is always a, 'if you click here, you can donate to the campaign.' HOWARD KURTZ: So it can be a fund-raising tool as well. RAY SUAREZ: But liking something is done so easily, that I'm not sure it really ends up mattering that much. There you are. You're looking down your column of little missives and things that have been dropped in your lap by your list of friends. HOWARD KURTZ: But, remember, Ray, that you are broadcasting not only the fact that you like something, but it could be a video that could be shared, it could be an argument that was made online. You're broadcasting this -- or narrow-casting, I guess I should say, to all of your friends. And although we in the media prefer that people get their information from us, people like getting it from people they trust. RAY SUAREZ: Maybe that's it. (LAUGHTER) RAY SUAREZ: I want them to get it from us. (LAUGHTER) RAY SUAREZ: Lauren Ashburn, Howard Kurtz, good to talk to you. HOWARD KURTZ: Same here. LAUREN ASHBURN: Thank you.

All Facebook: CNN, Facebook announce several initiatives for 2012 Presidential Election http://allfacebook.com/cnn-2012-presidential-election_b93836 David Cohen July 9, 2012 CNN and Facebook are gearing up for the 2012 presidential election Nov. 6 with the upcoming launch of Facebook application Im Voting, as well as combining efforts to measure metrics about the presidential and vice presidential candidates, and conducting surveys. Im Voting will enable Facebook users to commit to vote for and endorse specific candidates and issues, and their commitments will be displayed on their timelines, news feeds, and tickers.

The app will be available in English and Spanish, and commitments will be visually displayed by U.S. state on an interactive map. The cable news network and the social network said they will also team up to measure metrics about President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Republican nominee Mitt Romney, and Romneys upcoming selection as running mate, detailing discussion about each candidate on a state-by-state basis. And CNNs editorial department will join forces with Facebook on survey questions, with the results to be published on CNN, CNN.com, and the U.S. Politics on Facebook page. CNN Digital Senior Vice President KC Estenson said: We fundamentally changed the way people consume live event coverage online, setting a record for the most-watched live video event in Internet history, when we teamed up with Facebook for the 2009 Inauguration of President Obama. By again harnessing the power of the Facebook platform and coupling it with the best of our journalism, we will redefine how people engage in the democratic process and advance the way a news organization covers a national election. CNN Washington Bureau Chief Sam Feist added: This partnership doubles down on CNNs mission to provide the most engaging coverage of the 2012 election season. CNNs unparalleled political reporting, combined with Facebooks social connectivity, will empower more American voters in this critical election season. Facebook Vice President of U.S. Public Policy Joel Kaplan said: Each campaign cycle brings new technologies that enhance the way important connections between citizens and their elected representatives are made. Although the mediums have changed, the critical linkages between candidates and voters remain. Innovations like Facebook can help transform this informational experience into a social one for the American people. And Facebook VP of Corporate Communications Joe Lockhart added: By allowing citizens to connect in an authentic and meaningful way with presidential candidates and discuss critical issues facing the country, we hope more voters than ever will get involved with issues that matter most to them. Facebook is pleased to partner with CNN on this uniquely participatory experience. Readers: Would you be willing to use the Im Voting app to share your political views on Facebook, or do you believe those should remain private? The Hill: Romney Camp Offers Facebook Supporters Merchandise Deal http://thehill.com/blogs/twitter-room/other-news/236421-romney-camp-offers-facebook-supportersmerchandise-deal Alicia Cohn July 6, 2012 Mitt Romney's campaign continues to innovate in its outreach to supporters on Facebook, successfully leveraging a coupon tool this week to offer users 30 percent off on official merchandise. Marking the first time a political campaign's online store used Facebook Offers, Romney's campaign offered supporters a coupon for 30 percent off a "Believe" T-shirt in the campaign store. The offer ran on July 4 and 5, and the Romney campaign called it a successful experiment claimed by more than 18,600 Facebook users.

"I would say it is a success and one we look to replicate in the future," Romney's digital director, Zac Moffatt, said. Facebook Offers allows for social buying, meaning that if one person "claims" a coupon offer posted on a page they already follow, people to whom they are connected on Facebook automatically see the offer associated with a friend. Like social advertising, the offer reaches an expanding group. The campaign is working hard to leverage Facebook as an important part of its social media strategy, and the effort has paid off recently in an upward climb in Romney's number of Facebook fans. Romney supporters seem especially to enjoy seeing pictures of the presumed GOP nominee and his family. Romney got a huge number of "likes" over 53,350 on an Independence Day photo with the caption: "Some much needed family time this week." That's more likes and shares than on most of the other recent items on his page, including his response to the Supreme Court's ruling on a healthcare reform act that is hated by the majority of his conservative voting base. The Atlantic: A Tour Of The Self-Contained, Design-Happy City of Obamaland http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/06/a-tour-of-the-self-contained-design-happy-city-ofobamaland/259145/ By Nancy Scola July 2, 2012 CHICAGO -- Out on the campaign trail, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are at the moment engaged a spirited rhetorical debate over what it means to be an "outsourcing pioneer," a phrase borrowed from the Washington Post's coverage of Romney's Bain Capital past. For the most part, it's been discussion waged in generalities. But a tour of Obama's headquarters half-seriously suggests that the president might just want to point to his own campaign as a demonstration of doing things in-house. The scene on this floor of downtown's One Prudential Plaza is of waves of hundreds of staffers working amid a sea of college banners, rubber therapeutic balls, cardboard boxes turned into standing desks, and a visitor is struck by how much their five-year-old political operation has come to believe in rolling its own creative work. It's as if, should the Obama campaign end tomorrow, you'd have the minds, skill sets, and tools ready to power a decent-sized tech company. Maybe even a small sovereign nation. According to the story floating around, campaign manager Jim Messina took a year to tap the brains of tech world luminaries like Apple's Steve Jobs and Google's Eric Schmidt and came away with a few new ideas about how to run an organization. One was the belief in the "pod." Rather than distribute staffers in offices according to job function, this time around much of the Obama campaign is organized around five regional clusters. A few senior staffers have offices -- national field director Jeremy Bird and battleground states director Mitch Stewart pore over maps in one, Teddy Goff and Joe Rospars plot digital strategy in another -but in a switch from 2008, staffers generally sit in an large open room, at long tables arranged in row after row. In one corner of the open space are a few of your more traditional political teams. The policy shop is smaller than last time, befitting a situation where much of that agenda is set by Washington. The surrogate team is bigger. It makes sense: the campaign principals, and the president and vice president in particular, have fairly demanding day jobs.

That's all well and good, but what particularly jumps out is the way in which the Obama campaign has focused on setting up the sort of creative operations that weren't in the past traditionally associated with a political campaign. It's a lesson, perhaps, that Messina took to heart from the experiences of Jobs and Apple: Keep the means of production close, and the ability to iterate at the ready. What does that look like in practice? At Obama campaign headquarters, it means dozens and dozens of staffers with expertise in the digital space grouped into dedicated teams, with the ability and responsibility to tackle meaty challenges in their particular space. In one back corner is the Technology team, charged with building out a robust infrastructure for making the campaign run, like the Dashboard software that aims to bridge online and offline organizing. But the Tech team is not to be confused with the Digital Development team, which, as the campaign tells it, handles the dreaming up of new ways to use digital tools. Digital Advertising gets its own row close to the team that produces the campaign's wide-ranging online video work, from national ads to targeted training videos. (Almost all of the campaign's video is produced in-house, though Davis Guggenheim's 17-minute docu-advertisment was a high-profile exception.) Then there's the team known simply as Outbound. That group of staffers is responsible for writing the words that come out of the campaign in electronic form, from emails to texts to tweets to Facebook posts to Pinterest pins to Instagram captions. Outbound didn't exist in any cohesive way in 2008, says the campaign. There's simply a far larger universe of digital content to be filled this time around, and tasking a single team with managing the campaign's voice is a bid to create consistency across online platforms. Down the hall and off the main room sits the Design team. Obama campaign HQ is demonstrably a place where the creatively inclined are allowed to let their design flag fly. And tucked off a back hallway is the lab they need to do it. It might not be Jony Ive's cave of experimentation at Apple headquarters, but after too much time and money spent working with outside print shops last time around, the campaign decided to set up its own production facility on site. They call it the "Chop Shop;" its logo, as you can see below, is a pair of X-acto knives crossed over an Obama rising sun logo. The facility gives the campaign's creatives the ability to dream up and quickly produce the materials that provide the look and feel of the campaign. What happens when you put creative talent within easy reach of the means of production? In this case, you get an environment that's a little signage-happy. But there's more advantage to it than that. Certainly the Romney campaign has been staffing up in the last few months, but back in January the Republican candidate's digital director was testifying to the campaign's belief in staying small. Their tack: "We go out and find companies whose size we can leverage, experts we can work with, that let us be much larger than our size." Arguably, the Obama campaign's in-house approach frees it to experiment. Without drawing up any big project spec sheet, staff time can go to producing products that might only reach a handful of people. Take, for example, this data-heavy YouTube video produced by the campaign in March. In three months, the campaign's two-minute update on how many field offices had been opened, phone calls made, and "team leaders" appointed has been watched fewer than 10,000 times. If it's a few thousand of the right people, though, you can begin to see why it might be worth the staff time. Then there are posters whipped up on site that, often, don't seem to travel much beyond the campaign's doors. One hanging in headquarters (and seen below) riffs off the president's 2012 proclamation for Women's History Month -- "As we make headway on the crucial issues of our time, let the courageous vision

championed by women of past generations inspire us to defend the dreams and opportunities of those to come." -- and is turned into a visualization with a mapping of famously accomplished women like soccer great Mia Hamm, the New York Times' Jill Abramson, and, yes, Michelle Obama. The poster to its left displays the Obamaesque slogan, "The definition of hope is you still believe even when it's hard." But a Google search reveals that, in a bit of Outbound/Design team synergy, perhaps, that saying is only known to the world through a Pinterest pin of a photograph of the poster itself. But that's not to say that the campaign's free-flowing creative experimentation is for naught. Whether the Obama campaign's heavy focus on its home-grown creative operations is sound strategy is probably a judgment to ultimately be made on November 7. But from one angle, though, while the Obama operation won't talk specific numbers, all signs suggest that merchandising has been a fundraising boon for the campaign. The Obama online store sells nearly 300 items, from the pedestrian logo buttons and pints to rather more whimsical items. There's "I like Obamacare" t-shirts for thirty bucks a pop. For $22.50, you can get a mug bearing Vice President Biden's mug that reads "Cup of Joe." Have a kitten? Get yourself a "I Meow for Michelle" cat collar, just $12. The campaign rather famously turned around mugs featuring the president's long-form birth certificate, under the tag line, "Made in the U.S.A." The Romney campaign has an online store too, sure. But theirs is about a tenth the size. A T-shirt that says "Super Fan" on it as about as edgy as things get. Merchandise gets whipped up and sold, one piece after another -- including in one particularly unique offline shop. The Obama campaign headquarters has a paraphernalia shop right on site. And it's not by the front door. Instead, it's deep in the bowels. According to the campaign, senior management decided that giving away bumper stickers to staff was so 2008. This time around, the merch shop is open a few times a week, solely for staff and the occasional visitor. (Staff do, I'm told, get a discount.) This is where Obama campaign aides can pick up their "I Bark for Barack" car magnets and Obama-Biden coaster sets. Sometimes they get things before anyone else does, as was the case with the custom-made Obama iPhone cases listed at $40 a piece. Do Obama campaign staff really spend their hard-earned paychecks buying swag emblazoned with the campaign's logo or their boss's name, no matter how well-designed it might be? Deputy press secretary Katie Hogan assures me they do. The line, she says, has been known to be out the door. With the campaign office rather packed with bodies and equipment, the organization is pressed for meeting space. But with the staff swag store, says Hogan, "it's lucrative enough to not turn it into a conference room." Now that's keeping things in-house. ClickZ: Obama Facebook Ads Promote Jobs Act Message http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/2188636/obama-facebook-ads-promote-jobs-act-message Kate Kaye July 2, 2012 If it's true that the 2012 presidential election will hinge on the economy and job growth, it's no surprise the Obama campaign is pushing his job creation record in TV and digital ads. The Obama for America camp has been running Facebook ads targeting voters in swing states such as Florida. The idea is to reinforce the same job creation message the campaign has been running in TV ads targeting swing states.

The Facebook ads encourage people to contact congress in support of President Barack Obama's jobs plan. The ads link to a Facebook page featuring video of the TV spot; that page links to the Jobs Now page on the official site. According to reports, the campaign has run the jobs-related TV ads in nine swing states including Colorado, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. If it's true that the 2012 presidential election will hinge on the economy and job growth, it's no surprise the Obama campaign is pushing his job creation record in TV and digital ads. The Obama for America camp has been running Facebook ads targeting voters in swing states such as Florida. The idea is to reinforce the same job creation message the campaign has been running in TV ads targeting swing states. The Facebook ads encourage people to contact congress in support of President Barack Obama's jobs plan. The ads link to a Facebook page featuring video of the TV spot; that page links to the Jobs Now page on the official site. According to reports, the campaign has run the jobs-related TV ads in nine swing states including Colorado, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. "President Obama proposed the American Jobs Act, but Republicans in Congress have refused to act on many of the common-sense ideas that would help our country continue to recover from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression," states the campaign site. The call to action: Call Congress. The page includes the number for the U.S. Capitol Switchboard, and prompts people to "Call Republicans in Congress and ask them to get to work on these proposals." However, unlike many similar campaigns, the landing page doesn't allow people to search for their representatives and doesn't single out names of particular Republicans to call. The page does include several talking points like "Prevent teachers and first responders from being laid off," and "Expand refinancing for responsible homeowners." Each can be easily tweeted or posted to Facebook. Go to the @BarackObama page on Twitter and the message is the same: "32 days until recess: It's time for Congress to act." The BarackObama.com home page also stresses the President's vision for the economy. Its been a long road for the Jobs Act and the ads supporting it. When Obama introduced the act in September 2011, the Democratic National Committee promoted the jobs plan with splashy expandable video ads. Earlier this year on early primary voting days the Obama camp stressed the administration's record on job growth in fact-filled ads on New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida news sites. Business Insider: Mitt Romney has a new strategy to dominate the Facebook campaign wars http://www.businessinsider.com/mitt-romney-campaign-facebook-social-media-zac-moffatt-barack-obama2012-6 Brett LoGiurato June 18, 2012 Mitt Romney's campaign has launched a new Facebook mobile advertising campaign, possibly becoming the first campaign to use the social networking giant's mobile ad platform, Romney's digital team director Zac Moffatt told Business Insider over the weekend.

The campaign will pay to highlight sponsored stories, in order to have a better chance of reaching Facebook users that "like" Mitt Romney's page. Moffatt said he believes the Romney campaign is the first to use Facebook mobile advertising. "It's a good way to feed the conversation, expand your reach a little bit," Moffatt told Business Insider. "It's just an opportunity for us to share our message to people who are already with Mitt who, in turn, share it with their friends and provide that first-person validation." For Moffatt, it's about making it easier to reach as many people as possible. In December, research from media analyst Benedict Evans found that about 40 percent of Facebook users are active on a mobile application. The Romney campaign also recently became the first to launch an advertising campaign with Apple's mobile iAd service on the iPhone, iPad and iTouch devices, and the campaign has been reaching Android users with mobile online advertising through Google. Facebook adds a unique piece to the mobile advertising puzzle. It's another way to reach the so-called "off the grid" voters that are now vital to a campaign's winning strategy. But any success with Facebook is especially valuable because of users' ability to share stories with hundreds even thousands of people with just one click. "Our goal as a campaign is to reduce the points of friction to share a message," Moffatt said. "Because we're talking to as many people as possible. We feel that the more people who hear Mitt's message, the more it will resonate. We need to get as many people engaged as people into the world of social and the world of digital. Facebook has that audience and platform built in. So what we're trying to do is to make it as simple for them on there." Facebook has recently taken some steps to make mobile advertising easier for marketers. In early June, the company started allowing advertisers to design ads specifically for mobile versions, and marketers can now put ads directly into users' news feeds. Moffatt thinks mobile advertising with Facebook will help the campaign as it tries to cut into President Barack Obama's three-plus-year head start on social platforms. On Facebook, Obama's page has more than 27 million "likes" to Romney's 2 million. One of the Romney campaign's first sponsored Facebook mobile stories was a post advocating for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Helped with a boost from the mobile app, Moffatt said, the campaign received its biggest Facebook response yet as of Monday morning, nearly 90,000 "likes," 8,000 comments and more than 2,500 shares. "That's what a campaign is supposed to be about giving people the tools and allowing them to decide what to do with it," Moffatt said. "But I think the message is far stronger. If you were to share that on your page or you were to like it, that sends a far stronger message than if we just go up on television and tell that story. "When 70,000 people like or share that story, that's a reach of millions of people that we didn't have to go out and buy anything on television, or buy anything in a newspaper," he added. "It's another way of being a holistic campaign." Guardian: Romneys Campaign Closing Gap on Obama in Digital Election Race http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/14/romney-campaign-digital-data-obama?newsfeed=true

Ed Pilkington and Amanda Michel June 14, 2012 Mitt Romney's campaign is beginning to close the gap on Barack Obama in the increasingly important digital race to engage and mobilize voters through the internet. Romney has been vastly outspent and out-gunned on digital outreach, with Obama spending at least twice as much on online advertising as his Republican contender. But observers of the 2012 election cycle have begun to notice a subtle but potentially significant shift in fortunes. They point to some measures of interactive engagement with voters which suggest the president's advantage is far smaller. Take Facebook. Obama has 27 million supporters who "like" his Facebook page, dwarfing Romney's lessthan-two million by a ratio of 14 to 1. Yet the gulf between the candidates is much smaller when calculated in terms of the number of people sharing and commenting on their Facebook wall posts 640,000 for Obama and 240,000 for Romney, or less than three to one. More than 60,000 people on Facebook have "liked" the latest Romney post demanding a repeal of so-called Obamacare. The most popular post on Obama's Facebook page in the last week, on equal pay, only marginally tops that with 70,000 endorsements. The same pattern is seen on Twitter, where Obama has 30 times as many followers as Romney. But according to the Romney campaign, recent tracking shows that each official tweet from the Republican candidate is retweeted 608 times, almost on a par with the 750 retweets for every official Obama message. The success the Republicans are having in generating social media interest around the presidential race has not gone unnoticed among Democratic circles. One prominent strategist for a left-leaning online consultancy told the Guardian that the figures were "terrifying". Despite these early encouraging signs for the Republicans, they still have a mountain to climb. A new study by the social media analytics company Socialbakers looked not just at the candidates' wall posts but at sharing right across Facebook, and found that Obama was still dominant. Last month he generated almost five times as much social media buzz on Facebook than his rival. But Romney's key digital strategists believe their efforts are beginning to reap rewards and make up some ground following months where they were at a natural disadvantage. While the Republicans were engaged in the long and bitter primary battle, Obama was able to build up his campaign team in Chicago without distraction. By 29 May, when Romney finally clinched the Republican nomination, Obama had amassed a total campaign team of 750 staff including scores of data analysts and programmers to Romney's meager 87, according to Romney advisers. "I give nothing but credit to the Obama folks who run a very successful programme with a very large staff that we are always amazed by," Zac Moffat, digital director of the Romney campaign, told the Personal Democracy Forum this week. "In size they are clearly ahead, but in terms of engagement, no, they are not.

There are a lot of indicators that suggest we are creating the campaign that we need to be successful in November." Over the past few years political campaigns have come to lean increasingly on digital technology and 2012 has been described as the first presidential election cycle where "big data" is front and centre of the race. Both main parties have compiled databases storing the personal details of millions of potential voters allowing them to micro-target their messages in the hope of raising money, encouraging volunteers and eventually getting people to the polls on November 6. The Obama re-election campaign, Obama for America, has been lauded for being at the forefront of digital innovation. But the Republicans have been more savvy at applying technology than they have been given credit for, and there is a sense that Obama's digital supremacy may have been overplayed. As far back as 2004 George Bush's staff could access the Republican party's data on voters and volunteers online in realtime a facility that the Obama campaign made a top priority this cycle. "You don't get a data advantage overnight," said Chuck DeFeo, the eCampaign Director for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign in 2004. "The Democrats have had longer to build, but it's not like the RNC has been sitting still." The chief digital wizard for the Romney campaign is Moffat, who has been in the position since the moment when the former governor of Massachusetts entered the race in 2007. He is an experienced organizer and data expert, having founded Targeted Victory, one of a handful of consultancies in the US that specialise in micro-targeting online advertising to specific geographical, demographic and interest groups. Moffat believes that targeted online advertising is becoming more and more crucial to any successful political campaign. "This is not a question of if but when. This is going to be the first cycle in which persuasion through digital paid media becomes a core part of the election process," he said. Moffat has latched on to recent surveys that show that in any given week one in three adult Americans do not watch any live television other than sport. He calls that group "off-the-grid", pointing out that they are immune from a traditional political campaign's main weapon TV attack ads. In the crucial swing state of Ohio, the proportion of off-the-griders rises to 40%. "Our entire consumption habits are changing. But many of the powers that be who determine TV ad buys don't seem to know this," Moffat said. Though Moffat is encouraged by recent signs of healthy online engagement with voters, he Under Moffat, the Romney campaign has unashamedly copied many of the tricks developed by the Obama team, albeit customising them for a conservative audience. Obama supporters were invited to enter a $3 lottery to have dinner with the Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker; Romney aped the idea, inviting his supporters to enter a $3 lottery to have dinner with Donald Trump.

The campaign is even using new digital tools that were created by Obama engineers in 2008. Optimizely, a tool that allows web developers to test different page configurations to see which is the most effective in

raising money and energising voters, was developed by an Obama engineer, Dan Siroker, in 2008; it is now being commercially leased to the Romney campaign. Like the Obama re-election effort, Mitt Romney's digital operation encourages voters to engage with them by signing on through the campaign's online volunteer centre using Facebook and Twitter. That allows the campaign to amass huge quantities of personal data on individuals, which it can then use to hone its messages back to them a form of micro-targeting that is hugely more sophisticated than in previous iterations. Messages can be fine-tuned by age, neighbourhood, voting history and interests of each single potential voter. This cycle campaigns are micro-targeting individuals by interpreting their consumer and online histories - determining who to hit and how to hit them using thousands of data points. Recent Romney online ads, include ones directed at mothers and at golf fanatics. Despite the similarities, there are important differences of emphasis between the two camps. Unlike the Obama campaign, which has amassed a massive digital team numbering more than 100, the Romney campaign "has built an army of consultants," says the Republican Governors Association's director of digital strategy, Matt Gagnon. That reflects Romney's own style as a former management consultant. "Romney is a consultant, and is numbers-driven. He's comfortable leaning on the private sector," Gagnon said. The use of contractors extends to Moffat's own company, Targeted Victory, which has so far been paid $2.5m out of Romney's election warchest. When it comes to demographics, Romney's Facebook following is dramatically different from Obama's. The most popular age group following Romney, according to Facebook's "likes" metrics, is 45 to 54 years. Obama's is 18 to 24 years. That may give Obama the edge with youth, but older citizens are more likely to vote. Obama's largest Facebook following is located in Chicago his home town whereas Romney's Facebook base is in Houston, Texas. To what extent engagement through social media will translate into votes in November is unknown. Both presidential campaigns are keeping mum over the number of volunteers actively making calls and going door to door, making it impossible to know whether such interaction can be channeled into real political capital upon which the final result may depend. Bloomberg Businessweek: Obama's CEO: Jim Messina Has a President to Sell http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-06-14/obamas-ceo-jim-messina-has-a-president-to-sell By Joshua Green June 14, 2012 The day after Jim Messina quit his job as White House deputy chief of staff last January, he caught a plane to Los Angeles, paid a brief visit to his girlfriend, and then commenced what may be the highest-wattage crash course in executive management ever undertaken. He was about to begin a new job as Barack Obamas campaign manager, and being a diligent student with access to some very smart people, he arranged a rolling series of personal seminars with the CEOs and senior executives of companies that included Apple (AAPL), Facebook (FB), Zynga (ZNGA), Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Salesforce (CRM), and DreamWorks

(DWA). I went around the country for literally a month of my life interviewing these companies and just talking about organizational growth, emerging technologies, marketing, he says at Obamas campaign headquarters in Chicago. In two long, private conversations, Steve Jobs tore into Messina for all the White House was doing wrong and what it ought to be doing differently, before going on to explain how the campaign could exploit technology in ways that hadnt been possible before. Last time you were programming to only a couple of channels, Jobs told him, meaning the Web and e-mail. This time, you have to program content to a much wider variety of channelsFacebook, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube (GOOG), Googlebecause people are segmented in a very different way than they were four years ago. When Obama declared for president, the iPhone hadnt been released. Now, Jobs told him, mobile technology had to be central to the campaigns effort. He knew exactly where everything was going, Messina says. He explained viral content and how our stuff could break out, how it had to be interesting and clean. At DreamWorks Studios, Steven Spielberg spent three hours explaining how to capture an audiences attention and offered a number of ideas that will be rolled out before Election Day. An early example of Spielbergs influence is RomneyEconomics.com, a website designed by the Obama team to tell the storya horror story, by their reckoningof Mitt Romneys career at Bain Capital. Afterward, Spielberg insisted that Messina sit down with the DreamWorks marketing team. Hollywood movie studios are expert, as presidential campaigns also must be, at spending huge sums over a few weeks to reach and motivate millions of Americans. A certain awestruck tone surfaces when Messina talks about these encounters and what they taught him. At 42, he is tall and slightly stooped, with an innocent face, a flop of blonde hair, and a sheepdog friendliness made somewhat surreal by the arsenal of profanity he deploys when not speaking for the record. Messina, whos from Denver, managed his first campaign as an undergraduate at the University of Montana and in the 20 years since has never lost a race. Before joining Obama in 2008, he alternated between running campaigns and working on Capitol Hill. He made his name as chief of staff to Senator Max Baucus of Montana, becoming known as Baucuss muscle for his skill as a behind-the-scenes enforcer. In 2005 he ran the Democrats successful pushback against George W. Bushs plan to privatize Social Security. He had a talent for getting K Street to see that it was to their advantage to get on board with whatever Baucus was doing, says Jim Manley, a former top aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. At the White House, Messina helped cut the deal with the pharmaceutical industry that cleared the way for the health-care reform law. Messina is unusual in Washington, at once a hard-bitten political fixer known for handling unpleasant tasks In the White House he was given all the, pardon my French, the st work, says Baucusand also earnestly devoted to self-improvement in a way few Washington operatives would want revealed. A sign on his old computer in Baucuss office, hung with no evident irony and left there by the staff as a token of fondness, reads, Be Better Today Than You Were Yesterday. Along with his conversations with CEOs, Messinas regimen for the new job included reading a hundred years worth of campaign histories piled on a shelf above his desk. But his obsession runs to the future, not the past, and to business as much as politics. Messina is convinced that modern presidential campaigns are more like fast-growing tech companies than anything found in a history book and his own job like that of the executives who run them. What theyve done is more readily applicable to me, because they all started very small and got big very quickly, he says. Messina came to this insight through a relationship with someone keenly attuned to these changes and famous for having groomed two other young men to run a very large enterprise: Eric Schmidt, Googles

executive chairman. Messina considers him a mentor. Jim and I met in the 2008 campaign and just hit it off on a personal basis, Schmidt says. We became very good friends. Schmidt was an early sounding board and later arranged many of the meetings with CEOs. Obama can use the help. Reelection campaigns are unglamorous affairs. For many supporters, the thrill of electing him has faded, and the idealism that once vitalized them has given way to disillusionment. In 2008, Obamas campaign earned acclaim for using tech to harness, in volunteers and dollars, the excitement surrounding his candidacy. He routed John McCain, outspending him nearly 3 to 1. This race will be different. Romney and his allies are certain to hold the financial upper hand, not least because the Supreme Courts Citizens United decision in 2010 allowed for a flood of corporate cash. The unspoken hope in Chicago is that superior strategy and a shrewd use of technology can make up for Obamas diminished stature and more formidable opponent. So Messina has spent 18 months studying and building. November will be a contest between two different visions of government but also between competing ideas about how to reach voters. Romneys campaign will take a traditional approach, heavy on television advertising and backed by a massive war chest. Obamas will rely on organization, scaling up to a national level the type of grass-roots effort Messina once ran for Baucus in Montana. His big bet is that Schmidt, Spielberg, and the rest are right about how far technology has advancedthat its come far enough to mitigate Obamas disadvantages and solve what David Plouffe, the White House adviser who ran the last campaign, calls our Electoral College Rubiks Cube. In that sense, the campaign is about how best to run a large, complex enterprise, while under tremendous pressure and public scrutiny. Messina is wagering Obamas second term on the idea that the collected wisdom of techs biggest titans can outsmart Romney, whose executive savvy has not just made him rich but brought him to the cusp of the presidency. Presidential campaigns are rarely what they seem. For all that the candidates crisscross the country, offering sweeping national visions and vowing to represent everyone, they really focus on only a handful of states. A campaign managers job is to spin the fantasy but not fall for it. The last election was unusual in that Obama really did conduct a national campaign, expand the electorate, and win a broad swath of voters. This election will mark a return to the mean, as is already evident in Obamas strategy, which aims not to expand the electorate but persuade a sliver of it. Messina is focused on seven statesFlorida, Ohio, Virginia, Iowa, North Carolina, Colorado, Nevadathat probably hold the key to the election. Neither the nature of the race nor the means of reaching voters will be quite the same. Messina often tries to convey this to donors by telling the story of how he came to be campaign manager. Its December 2010. Hes wading through chest-high surf in Hawaii with the president. Obama summons him over. Ive got a favor I want to ask, he says. Id like you to run the reelect. Messina replies that hes flattered, but hell only take the job on one condition: You have to understand, this will be nothing like the last campaign. I thought the last one went pretty well. It did. But everything is different now. The story is a windup to a sermon Messina likes to give about the importance of technology in reaching votersa sort of TED talk that echoes a point about which Schmidt, too, is adamant. Last January, as Messina was beginning his new job, Schmidt stepped back from Google and Larry Page took over as CEO. Since then, Schmidt has become a kind of guru to Messina, an executive coach and kindred spirit. The two became acquainted during the last campaign, just after Hillary Clinton dropped out of the race, when Messina, then Plouffes right hand, was preoccupied with ramping up for the general election. I said

to him, Youve done what Im being asked to do, Messina says. He said, Yes, I have. Let me sit down with you, and well talk. For three hours we sat in a conference room, and he just gave me advice about all the mistakes hed made, about purchasing supply chains, about HR, about the blocking and tackling of growing fast and making sure you have organizational objectives. What I like about Jim, Schmidt says, is that he starts the day thinking, What are the analytical measurements that I should make decisions on? Many people in politics have no concept of what I just said. Theyre intuitive thinkers, and theyre often right. But the difference is that to run a large operation in todays world, the best way to do it is analytically. And you have the tools now. Despite the last campaigns success using the Internet, Schmidt says the world hadnt yet reached the point where technology could transform how people run for president. In 2008 most people didnt operate on *Facebook and Twitter+, he says. The difference now is, first and foremost, the growth of Facebook, which is much, much more deeply penetrated into things. The other obvious ones are the growth of YouTube and Twitter. The smart people were using them in 2008; now everyones using them. You can imagine the implications of that. You can run political campaigns on the sum of those tools. In his memoir of the 2008 election, Plouffe discusses technologys importance. The 13 million e-mail addresses Obama collected were not just a potent way to raise money but also a valuable means of talking to supporters. We had essentially created our own television network, only better, he writes, because we communicated directly with no filter to what would amount to about 20 percent of the total number of votes we would need to wina remarkably high percentage. Both Schmidt and Messina share a fondness for the metrics that highlight these changes: Facebook users have grown tenfold since the last campaign, to more than 900 million. In 2008 most users were in their teens or twenties; the fastest-growing segment now is people over 50. On Election Day, Obama sent two tweets to his 116,000 Twitter followers; today, he has 16 million followers, and his top advisers are all prolific tweeters and minor social media celebrities. Extrapolating a bit, its not hard to imagine the campaign having a direct line to 50 percent or 70 percentor maybe moreof the voters it will need to win. To reach this expanding universe of potential supporters, the Obama team spent nine months building a platform it calls Dashboard, which allows field staffers and volunteers to access and update the campaigns voter database from an app on their phones. Canvassers can visit a neighborhood and see which houses are targets and which are a waste of time. Everything is updated in real timeno need to lug around a clipboard or check in at an office. And for voters, no more annoying knocks on the door when theyve just gotten a phone call or e-mail Dashboard is an important component of what the campaign refers to as the snowflake model of organizing, the idea that each paid staffer creates and oversees an expanding network of volunteersa snowflake. Last year, Obamas fundraisers pushed big donors to contribute the annual maximum of $35,800 right away. This would cover the salary of one paid field staffer, who oversees five unpaid neighborhood team leaders, each of whom brings in five team members, who then recruit 20 volunteers apiece. Total: 500 people. The campaign estimates each of the Obama snowflakes will produce an extra 1,000 votes. The earlier they did this, the more voters they would reach. My advice was to think about it in terms of quarters, says Schmidt. You really have six quarters between *last spring+ and the election. So essentially all of the key personnel decisions are made in the first quarter. And then you build from there. As Plouffe put it: Politics always has room for feel and instinct. But there is so much now that is measurable. We think from a technology and data perspective that what Jim has built will be the best that politics has ever seen. Silicon Valleys influence is evident even in the layout of the campaigns headquarters. Designed with input from Facebook executives, the floor plan has few private offices and lots of big, collaborative open spaces where staffers work in pods. This avoids a common Washington problem. The history of American

presidential campaigns is full of infighting, hatred, and rivalries. Al Gores and Hillary Clintons campaigns were riven with factionalism among status-obsessed aides on different floors. Obamas staff is spread across a single floorto all outward appearances, happily. At Schmidts suggestion, Messina bypassed the political pros who usually handle campaign technology and opted to build it in-house. Eric said to me, for a lot of these positions, you dont want political people, Messina says. You need innovators, people who can get stuff done quickly. The campaigns chief technology officer, Harper Reed, is a friendly, bearded startup veteran with gauged earlobes and lots of tattoos, whod never worked in politics and was brought in from the online T-shirt vendor Threadless.com. He looks like hes the heavy-metal lead guitarist in Metallica, Messina says. But hes a genius. He threw out all the old conventional wisdom and said, Show me what you want on a white board. Ill build it for you. Under Reed, the Obama team has built systems for registering voters, organizing volunteers, and generally vacuuming up and analyzing every available bit of personal datanot only voting patterns, political contributions, and consumer preferences but also what people read and share, and how they respond to e-mails, ads, tweets, and other solicitations. At the suggestion of another of Messinas advisers, Obama-themed merchandise has become a lucrative revenue source. Early on, Messina met, and was dazzled by, Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue and inspiration for The Devil Wears Prada, who created a spreadsheet to convince him that fashion could generate serious money for the campaign. What is the one thing everyone has from 08? A T-shirt, Messina says. Wintour drew conservatives scorn for appearing in an online video soliciting donors for a fundraising dinner for the first couple with Sarah Jessica Parker. Her influence actually runs much deeper. Last fall the campaign held a runway show in Manhattan to unveil a luxury clothing line by celebrity designers, including Vera Wang and Diane von Furstenberg. Messina, whose own fashion sense borders on the tragic, was introduced on the runway by Scarlett Johansson. Republicans gleefully mock Obamas designer collection as an exercise in narcissism. (The Romney campaign also sells merchandise, mostly the standard T-shirts, hats, and buttons.) Messina sees only the influx of millions of dollarsalthough he wont say how many millions. Sure, the $95 Thakoon Panichgul scarf and $75 Tory Burch tote bag are outlandish, but they net a lot more than $10 Hanes T-shirts. Raise money, register voters, and persuade voters, Messina says. Everything has to feed into those three things. From the outside, its not clear that will be enough. On June 7, the Romney campaign said it raised $76 million in May, topping Obamas $60 million and marking the first time in five years that Obama had been outraised. Despite Spielbergs input on the Bain ad, elite opinion was that it mostly flopped, after campaign surrogates, including Bill Clinton and Cory Booker, veered off message and commended Romneys business record, to the delight of Republicans and cable news producers. Messina is adamant that the Bain attack succeeded among the uncommitted voters hes concerned with, who ignore pundits and are only now beginning to form opinions of Romney. When people say, Hows the Bain thing playing? it doesnt matter what the set of Morning Joe has to say about it, Plouffe says. But if youre a 45-year-old swing voter in Toledo, Ohio, what are you seeing? Whats in your local newspaper? What ads are running? And whats going on in the local field operation? Thats what really matters. Its true these voters will probably decide the election. All the technology, money, and management theory really amount to an elaborate, determined effort to discredit Romney and win their support. By virtue of his background, Messina may be especially well suited to that job.

Messina will go a long way to win, as the two leading stories from his Montana career suggest. Both involve the 2002 Senate race he ran for Baucus, a Democrat seeking reelection in a terrible year for Democrats. To protect Baucus, Messina had him refuse to participate in any debate that didnt also include a fringe thirdparty candidate whod inadvertently dyed his skin blue with homemade antibioticsa guaranteed distraction. The other story involved his Republican challenger, a state senator named Mike Taylor, who was the target of an ad so devastating it got national attention. The ad charged Taylor with having embezzled student loans from a cosmetology school hed owned in the 1980s. But its force lay in the music and imagery. Set to a porn soundtrack, it featured snippets of an old television ad for Taylors hair salon that showed the candidate clad in a medallioned, open-shirted disco outfit, massaging lotion into another mans face, and then appearing to reach toward the mans crotch, as a narrator intoned, Not the way we do business in Montana. Jim is tough, Baucus says. Ill never forget when he showed me that ad. We were in Bozeman in a motel. The curtains were drawn. He said, Max, what do you think? They were afraid I wasnt going to like it. I loved it! Humiliated, Taylor quit the race, and Baucus sailed to victory. I found out quickly from Messina that there was no honor in politics, Taylor says in an e-mail. Starting out in Montana provided a broad education in all aspects of a campaign. A rural state with fewer than a million residents, Montana is so cheap even a legislative candidate on a $20,000 budget can run a sophisticated campaign with radio and television ads, direct mail, and phone banks. Districts are small enough that candidates can, and are expected to, knock on every door. Messina became known as a field guy for his dogged emphasis on voter contact. It taught me very early on, he says, that you can win if you run good enough grass roots and youre very clear about the differences with your opponent. Because Montana typically votes Republican for president, its often regarded as a red state, but its almost evenly divided between the parties. Politics here is competitive, says Dave Hunter, a local consultant and early mentor to Messina. Democrats usually perform at around 47 or 48 percent, so candidates have to run a little better campaign than Republicans to win statewide. The state also lacks a significant minority presence. We really dont have African Americans or a Hispanic population, Hunter says. You win in Montana by convincing white, independent voters to turn out for you. Its good experience for presidential politics because its not about turning out your base; its about persuasion. Ten years later, Messina is trying to do the same thing, only at a much higher level. Montana is out of reach. But the seven states hes targeted, as well as a few more he hopes wont end up in play, all lie within striking distance of either candidate. If the European crisis explodes or an attack on Iran drives up oil prices, the U.S. economy may tank and render moot all of Messinas careful planning. Or the recovery could pick up steam, or the old gaffe-prone Romney could return and hand Obama an unexpectedly easy win. A likelier scenario, though, is that the race will be close. Messina seems to believe thats what will happen. Jim has said to me, This is the most important thing I will do in my lifetime, says Penny Pritzker, the national finance chair of the last campaign. Should it come to that, Messina will have a chance to do what every campaign manager dreams of doing, what most Washington operatives brag about doing, but what only an elect few have ever actually done make the difference in a presidential election. Then, the CEOs will come to him for ad POLITICO: Obamas Data Advantage http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0612/77213.html Lois Romano June 9, 2012

CHICAGO On the sixth floor of a sleek office building here, more than 150 techies are quietly peeling back the layers of your life. They know what you read and where you shop, what kind of work you do and who you count as friends. They also know who your mother voted for in the last election. The depth and breadth of the Obama campaigns 2012 digital operation from data mining to online organizing reaches so far beyond anything politics has ever seen, experts maintain, that it could impact the outcome of a close presidential election. It makes the presidents much-heralded 2008 social media juggernaut which raised half billion dollars and revolutionized politics look like cavemen with stone tablets. Mitt Romney indeed is ramping up his digital effort after a debilitating primary and, for sure, the notion that Democrats have a monopoly on cutting edge technology no longer holds water. But its also not at all clear that Romney can come close to achieving the same level of technological sophistication and reach as his opponent. (The campaign was mercilessly ridiculed last month when it rolled out a new App misspelling America.) Its all about the data this year and Obama has that. When a race is as close as this one promises to be, any small advantage could absolutely make the difference, says Andrew Rasiej, a technology strategist and publisher of TechPresident. More and more accurate data means more insight, more money, more message distribution, and more votes. Adds Nicco Mele, a Harvard professor and social media guru: The fabric of our public and political space is shifting. If the Obama campaign can combine its data efforts with the way people now live their lives online, a new kind of political engagement and political persuasion is possible. Launched two weeks ago, Obamas newest innovation is the much anticipated Dashboard," a sophisticated and highly interactive platform that gives supporters a blueprint for organizing, and communicating with each other and the campaign. In addition, by harnessing the growing power of Facebook and other online sources, the campaign is building what some see as an unprecedented data base to develop highly specific profiles of potential voters. This allows the campaign to tailor messages directly to them depending on factors such as socio-economic level, age and interests. The data also allows the campaign to micro-target a range of dollar solicitations online depending on the recipient. In 2008, the campaign was the first to maximize online giving raising hundreds of millions of dollars from small donors. This time, they are constantly experimenting and testing to expand the donor base. For example, they have found $3 to be a magic number: Asking supporters for that paltry donation to win a chance to attend a fundraiser with the president and George Clooney or Sarah Jessica Parker, has generated tens of thousands of responses people from whom the campaign can collect highly valuable data and then go back to. They are way ahead of Romney micro-targeting and its a level of precision we havent seen before, says Darrell M. West, a leading scholar on technology innovation at the Brookings Institution. *The Obama campaign has] been able to work on it under the radar during the Republican primary season.

Obama already this year has outspent Romney significantly (and outspent his own 2008 levels) for online advertising, according to several market analyses the numbers. The hope for the Obama team, says West, is that his online reach will outweigh any Superpac funding advantage Romney might have for television advertising, by reaching deep into communities with targeted online advertising, grass-roots organizing and fundraising. The other hope, of course, is that Obama can replicate some of the online excitement that propelled him into office four years ago. Romney campaign officials acknowledge that they have had neither the time, nor the resources to build a complex digital operation as they were fighting their way through the prolonged primary season. It wasnt something we were going to put resources into if he wasnt the nominee, said one adviser. It is also apparent that the Romney campaign will stick closely to the traditional campaign model of heavy and expensive television spending with the assist of wealthy conservative super PACs that have signaled a willingness to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat Obama. While the campaign is beginning to increase staff in preparation for the general election, Romney digital director Zac Moffatt says they will do things differently than the Obama operation. For one, Moffatt says the Romney campaign will outsource much of their data management instead of handling it in house, creating customized solutions to fit their needs. As a campaign we would not presume to know more than the collective intelligence and resources of the marketplace, said Moffatt, who adds that they will target audience through our partnership with an industry-leading data management platform. In the end, what is most important is not how many people on any list or how many followers we have but their engagement level. And our followers are engaged, Moffitt said. Harvards Mele, who at age 25 helped pioneer the use of social media technology on Howard Deans 2004 presidential campaign, said that even with some obvious attrition to Obamas 2008 database, Romney is trailing. Im not going to say he cant catch up because with enough money and intensity, it may be doable but it seems very unlikely to me, said Mele. (Obama) used the powerful narrative of his 2008 campaign to build a digital infrastructure that remains formidable, both in terms of data and sheer know-how and expertise. The challenge facing both campaigns in 2012 is the changing consumer and the endless ways they receive information. Four years ago, supporters might have been satisfied with just friending a candidate on Facebook, but today most users expect a more sophisticated way to actually engage and on their terms. While Obama campaign officials guard details about its digital operation as fiercely as Romney guards his tax returns, they were willing to share some advances since 2008: Created a holistic, totally in-house digital operation that is the largest department at campaign headquarters. In 2008, much of the social media and video was generated organically from supporters. As one campaign official put it, digital is no longer a part of the campaign. It is the campaign.

 Hired a number of nonpolitical tech innovators, software engineers and statisticians. It has been incredibly freeing, because all election campaigns are a slave to history, and the history here is just nonexistent, says Obama campaign manager Jim Messina. So, weve been able to kind of reinvent it. Invested mightily in cutting-edge technology that scales the website to fit the screen of any device. With nearly half of the U.S. population using smart phones, responsive design allows a user to give money and volunteer without bifocals. More than 40 percent of all our donors are new, and a lot of them are coming in because of things like this, says Messina. Call up our website and try to donate on your phone and then do Romneys. Those things are important, because people are busy and people want to help us and they think about Oh, yeah, I saw the president on TV. I want to give them money. How hard is it? Developed a more complex symbiosis between the campaign and Facebook, which is 10 times bigger than it was four years go, and has far more personal information available to mine. Facebook was just a site to see friends four year ago now it is part of peoples DNA, notes a senior campaign adviser. Obama invites supporters to log on to the campaign through their Facebook accounts, which gives the campaign one more avenue for data. Opened the first all-volunteer. all-digital office in San Francisco where knowledgeable techies drop in for a few hours and strive to develop new software for the campaign under the supervision of paid staff. Staffed a full-time digital director in each of about a dozen battleground states to effectively run minigeneral election campaigns in those states. Last time, we had two campaigns, Messina said. We had the on-the-ground, door-knocking, person-toperson campaign, and then we had the digital campaign. But most of the digital campaign was really organized by [supporters] by themselves. This time, says Messina, its the campaign thats driving and controlling most digital content. The goal is to burst through the wall of those two things. Twitter was just gaining steam in 2008 when campaign used the platform largely to notify followers about events. The campaign had 118, 000 followers at election time and about 2.4 million Facebook followers. Today, Obama has 16 million Twitter followers to Romneys 500,000, and Michelle Obama has nearly 1 million to Ann Romneys 45,000. On Facebook, Obama has nearly 27 million followers to Romneys 1.8 million. (Its hard to know how many of either mans followers are non-American.) We are building content to a variety of different channels, because what has really changed is the channels are different, and so some people are going to get all of their stuff through Facebook, some people now do Twitter, some people are going to go directly to our website, some people like it on email, some people like it on text, Messina said. Less certain for Obama is whether his vast digital empire can recreate the movement and excitement of 2008. Messina makes it clear that some tried-and-true methods still apply. Its even more important this time than last time to run a real grass-roots campaign thats built on turning out our voters, persuading undecided voters and making sure theyll vote on Election Day, he says, and that is the kind of the organizing were doing.

Huffington Post: Will the Online Campaign Kill the TV Ad? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/07/online-campaign-political-advertising-tvad_n_1576434.html?1339087028 Ryan Grim June 8, 2012 WASHINGTON -- The political consulting industry knows how to do one thing very, very well. Give a consultant a few million dollars and he or she will test a message, blanket the airwaves with it, run a poll and show you it has moved the numbers. But nearly a decade after Howard Dean's campaign for president introduced the Internet to the political world, that reliance on traditional media remains the dominant strategy. As The Huffington Post reported Tuesday, political consultants have already had their hands on $466 million this election cycle, with the largest portion of it flowing through them -- with the requisite commission skimmed, of course -- to pay for television ads. The consultants face a problem, however: Fewer people are kicking back on the couch to watch live TV, a long-term trend that shows no signs of reversing itself. Even as record amounts of money are being shoveled at local network affiliates lucky enough to have media markets in swing states, a new generation of consultants has its eye on the post-television era. The top 150 consultants have so far grossed just over $214 million this election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission filings. The fourth biggest firm on the list is Bully Pulpit Interactive, a next-generation online consulting shop which runs the Obama campaign's online component. BPI has so far pulled in $18.5 million. (Disclosure: BPI advertises on huffingtonpost.com.) Online consultants in the top 150 have combined to gross more than $49 million, according to a HuffPost analysis. That figure likely covers some spending that wasn't purely targeted at online activity, though the amount would be marginal. In fact, because many traditional firms have minor online components as well, the overall online spending among the top firms is likely much higher. All told, online spending accounts for about one dollar out of of every four spent this cycle. Take the case of Ted Cruz. The Tea Party Texan surprised the Lone State establishment last week by forcing a runoff with Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, also a Republican, and the elite's preferred and very well financed candidate. Cruz's campaign worked directly with Facebook to craft a strategy that focused heavily online, generating a following that far outpaced his rivals. (Facebook's bipartisan pair of political advisers make themselves available to candidates regardless of party. The Texas runoff for the U.S. Senate seat is at the end of July.) "With people watching less television, there's a category of people you're not catching on TV, who don't have landlines [and so can't be reached by robocalls or pollsters]. But they are Internet users," said Taryn Rosenkranz, whose consulting firm New Blue Interactive works to build online support for progressive candidates. "The amount of minutes that people spend on the Internet has increased each year by double."

Across the political spectrum, but in particular for some Democrats and progressives, the Internet is increasingly seen as a high-growth potential strategy in the era of unlimited spending unleashed by five members of the Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision. Getting outspent many times over -- as happened to Democrats in Wisconsin's recall election -- means less if the money spent on TV ads doesn't translate into persuasion and votes. If, instead, voters connected by social networks can share information and encourage each other to vote, the playing field would be (at least slightly) leveled. Because of Facebook's privacy policies, little academic work has been done to measure voting and political behavior on the social network. One study, however, has found promising results. For her dissertation at Georgia State University, Holly Teresi tested whether status updates from a friend could noticeably improve a person's knowledge of current electoral politics, or move people to head to the polls who might otherwise have sat at home. The American people are notoriously stingy with their vote -- most other industrialized democracies have dramatically higher voting rates. Major get-out-the-vote campaigns in the U.S. are generally considered successful if they increase turnout by just a percentage point or two. Teresi's findings blow the typical get-out-the-vote performance away. The study was completed in May 2012 and provided to HuffPost by Teresi, who now works for the New Organizing Institute. Data was collected from several different pools of voters that ranged between 100 and 700. Voters in her control group who were not given a message from a friend about voting on election day turned out at a 22 percent rate. Those who received messages encouraging them to vote and letting them know when election day was turned out at a rate of 30 percent. An eight point jump -- an increase of more than a third -- is the kind of thing that can turn an election. Teresi also found that voters who were given some information about the election by a friend were better able to retain it. Meanwhile, Facebook ads, and even Facebook ads "liked" by a friend, had no discernible impact on voting patterns. Absolutely blanketing voters with Facebook ads, however, has shown an ability to move the needle. The consulting firm Chong & Koster blasted some Florida voters with an average of five ads a day on Facebook, encouraging a no vote on a proposition that would have increased school class sizes. Voters exposed to the ads were more likely to vote no than a typical voter -- and more likely to oppose it than a typical Democrat. Rahm Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff, relied on Bully Pulpit Interactive to run a major campaign through Facebook, claiming to have reached 30 percent of all Emanuel voters online. (In 2010, 12 million people clicked "I Voted" on Facebook on election day, but the number is impossible to verify because the company won't allow researchers to compare its findings with voter files.) In Ohio, The New Media Firm deeply engaged Facebook in the effort to beat back the anti-union measure SB 5. According to the firm, 50,000 people talked about the "We Are Ohio" campaign on Facebook, reaching 500,000 of their friends. As long as TV can still move the numbers, however, the focus will remain there. But consultants interviewed for this story, whether rooted more in traditional or online campaigning, universally acknowledged that the focus is shifting.

"The Democratic Party's base wants it to go that way. There's a lot of push from big donors. There's a lot of Hollywood money [that] knows how much the media landscape is changing. Our big donors tend to be from those realms -- venture capital, social media -- that are a little more innovative," said one consultant, who requested anonymity because he did not wish to speak publicly about donors. "Even this election, I've noticed a difference in the last six to eight months in people's willingness to think about things differently." Once they do start thinking differently, candidates find a wide range of new ways to reach voters. The consultant, for instance, described tracking users online and matching their IP and home address to the voter file to determine whether they're registered to vote, and if so, how. Doing so gives campaigns an unprecedented amount of information on a specific voter, allowing messages to be precisely tailored. The Internet also allows candidates to slice the audience much more finely. Rather than advertising to everyone who is watching "Jeopardy," for example, candidates can have their ads appear only in front of users who have already been identified as, say, strong progressives, or arch conservatives. Rosenkranz of New Blue Interactive warned candidates not to underestimate the power of social networks and peer-to-peer activism during her time as a top fundraiser for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Some politicians get nervous about the two-way nature of the online medium. But, she said, candidates need to trust their supporters to brawl for them in the seemingly limitless threads that come together to make up the online political debate. "People used to be afraid of this consumer-driven conversation, but you put out a message and your activist supporters are going to defend you," she said. "They really become your message megaphone." Washington Post: Big Data From Social Media, Elsewhere Online Redefines Trend-Watching http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/big-data-from-social-media-elsewhere-online-taketrend-watching-to-new-level/2012/06/06/gJQArWWpJV_story.html Ariana Eunjung Cha June 6, 2012 From a trading desk in London, Paul Hawtin monitors the fire hose of more than 340 million Twitter posts flying around the world each day to try to assess the collective mood of the populace. The computer program he uses generates a global sentiment score from 1 to 50 based on how pessimistic or optimistic people seem to be from their online conversations. Hawtin, chief executive of Derwent Capital Markets, buys and trades millions of dollars of stocks for private investors based on that number: When everyone appears happy, he generally buys. When anxiety runs high, he sells short. Hawtin has seen a gain of more than 7 percent in the first quarter of this year, and his method shows the advantage individuals, companies and governments are gaining as they take hold of the unprecedented amount of data online. Traders such as Hawtin say analyzing mathematical trends on the Web delivers insights and news faster than traditional investment approaches. The explosion in the use of Google, Facebook, Twitter and other services has resulted in the generation of some 2.5 quintillion bytes each day, according to IBM. Big data, as it has been dubbed by researchers, has become so valuable that the World Economic Forum, in a report published last year, deemed it a new class of economic asset, like oil.

Business boundaries are being redrawn, the report said. Companies with the ability to mine the data are becoming the most powerful, it added. While the human brain cannot comprehend that much information at once, advances in computer power and analytics have made it possible for machines to tease out patterns in topics of conversation, calling habits, purchasing trends, use of language, popularity of sports, spread of disease and other expressions of daily life. This is changing the world in a big way. It enables us to watch changes in society in real time and make decisions in a way we havent been able to ever before, said Gary King, a social science professor at Harvard University and a co-founder of Crimson Hexagon, a data analysis firm based in Boston. The Obama campaign employs rows of people manning computers that monitor Twitter sentiment about the candidates in key states. Google scientists are working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to track the spread of flu around the world by analyzing what people are typing in to search. And the United Nations is measuring inflation through computers that analyze the price of bread advertised in online supermarkets across Latin America. Many questions about big data remain unanswered. Concerns are being raised about personal privacy and how consumers can ensure that their information is being used fairly. Some worry that savvy technologists could use Twitter or Google to create false trends and manipulate markets. Even so, sociologists, software engineers, economists, policy analysts and others in nearly every field are jumping into the fray. And nowhere has big data been as transformative as it has been in finance. Wall Street is all about information advantage. Every little bit could mean the difference between a bonanza or a devastating loss, and so big data is being fed into computers to power high-frequency trading algorithms and directly to traders in every way imaginable. Hedge funds are experimenting with scanning comments on Amazon product pages to try to predict sales. Banks are tallying job listings on Monster as an indicator of hiring. Investment firms are conducting computer analyses of the financial statements of public companies to search for signs of a bankruptcy. Why wait for the government to release official numbers on auto sales, home sales and retail sales when the trends could be gleaned weeks or even months earlier by analyzing publicly available data online? Five years ago, only 2 percent of investment firms were incorporating Twitter analysis and other forms of unstructured data into their trading decisions, according to a report by Adam Honore, a research director at Aite, a financial services consulting group based in Boston. By 2010, the share of companies experimenting with this technology jumped to 35 percent. Today, Honore said, that number is closer to 50 percent. Big data is fundamentally changing how we trade, Honore said. Data in motion Richard Tibbetts, chief technology officer at StreamBase, a Lexington, Mass., company that provides tools for analyzing large amounts of data, calls it examining data in motion. The trick is to be able to find the digital smoke signals amid all the other stuff. Traders who were analyzing Twitter for unusual activity, for instance, were able to get the news of Osama bin Ladens death and a massacre in Norway hours before the

information was officially confirmed, giving them a significant jump on their colleagues who learned of the events through traditional news sources. The new generation of trader expects to have dozens of tools at their fingertips instead of just a Bloomberg terminal, Tibbetts said. Hawtin began experimenting with trading on a social-media sentiment algorithm in the spring of 2011, tapping $40 million from his now-closed hedge fund. He has repeatedly warned potential investors that there is a high level of risk. Its a very new area we dont fully understand yet, he said. But the interest in his project was so great that in April he began offering his technology to retail investors. In addition to its efforts to gauge the collective mood of the world, the company now examines messages on Twitter, Facebook and other social-media outlets to create measures for individual stocks and commodities. On a recent weekday, Hawtin was studying his global sentiment monitor when he noticed something troubling, a surge in anxiety after two days of relative calm. After deliberating for a few minutes, he decided it was too early to take any action. If the anxiety continued to trend up the following day, he said, he would probably start selling. Theres a delay between how youre feeling about your economic situation and having that sentiment turned into a decision like buying or selling a stock or adjusting your portfolio, he said. The numbers support Hawtins strategy at least so far. His investors beat the main London stock index by seven-fold in the first quarter of this year. But programs such as Hawtins are only as good as the data being entered, and a growing backlash against big data may threaten the flow of that information. Privacy concerns Companies and governments are pushing the envelope in the use and reuse of data in ways not originally intended, and privacy groups are pushing back. Even the basic definition of personal data varies widely from one country to another, making it unclear how it can be used. The regulatory framework has not caught up with the technology. Tim Berners-Lee, a founder of the World Wide Web, has become so concerned about the misuse of personal information by companies and governments that he has warned people to be cautious about what they put online. The data sets are so large that they are normally analyzed in aggregate, but privacy advocates worry that information can still be tied to individuals. Civil liberties groups have sued to stop a U.S. government program that monitors social media data for national security threats, arguing that it could be used to unjustly label people as bad credit risks or even terrorists and chill free speech. There is also the danger of what scholars call information asymmetry, where certain parties have an unfair advantage because they have better information than others a phenomenon that some have argued shakes the foundation of a market economy.

It increases opportunities for those who are already richer and disadvantages those that are poor, said Jay Stanley, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington. Beyond the civil liberties issue, data streams can be manipulated. You can spam Twitter streams with positive words about a stock to make it look as if there is a groundswell of optimism about the company. Or you can use the same techniques to try to sink a stock. Vagelis Hristidis, an associate professor of computer science at the University of California at Riverside, is the lead author of a paper detailing another investment strategy based on Twitter. During a four-month simulation, his approach outperformed other baseline strategies and indexes, including the Dow Jones industrial average, by between 1.4 percent and 11 percent. A model that predicts the stock market, Hristidis said, can only be successful as long as people dont know about it. The Atlantic: At Campaign Fundraisers, Obama's Tech Staffers Are The Stars http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/at-campaign-fundraisers-obamas-tech-staffers-arethe-stars/256882/ By Nancy Scola May 8, 2012 Tonight, geeks in Brooklyn will take part in what can now fairly be called a mini-trend in political fundraising: the Obama campaign enlisting its technology staffers to serve as the draw at low-to-mid-dollar events, offering would-be donors not only a chance to rub elbows with those at the forefront of political technology but also a glimpse at what the campaign has in the works when it comes to the Internet, mobile, and more in its competition against Mitt Romney. Tapping campaign aides to headline fundraisers isn't a technique invented by the Obama campaign. But the organization is using its tech staffers more, and reaching more deeply into its bench, than has been past practice. As the general election nears, these "tech fundraisers" are one more return on the considerable investment in technology and technologists that the Obama campaign has been making since its own startup phase in 2007. Hosted at the sparely gorgeous bookstore and event space PowerHouse Arena in Dumbo, the fundraiser is billed as "The Obama Campaign's Digital Strategy: An Inside Perspective." Featured are Teddy Goff, Obama for America's digital director, and Joe Rospars, the campaign's chief digital strategist and architect of the 2008 campaign's online operation. Tickets start at $75 a person with access to a cash bar; $1,500 gets you a pre-event reception, rights to an open bar, and your name on the event invitation. For those who closely follow presidential politics, Rospars' name is reasonably well-known, if Goff's slightly less so, and both serve in roles that the Obama operation has famously treated as part of the campaign's senior management. But the Obama campaign has also, in recent months, included in the fundraising mix aides serving in jobs that traditionally had lower public profiles, if any profile at all, like chief technology officer Harper Reed and Catherine Bracy, the lead on Obama's San Francisco field office, which is geared towards volunteers with coding, design, and other technology skills. Figures like campaign manager Jim Messina, chief campaign strategist David Axelrod, and senior White House adviser David Plouffe occasionally serve as hosts for campaign fundraisers. But for some people, getting a chance to hear from, say, Goff about the next generation of the campaign's organizing platform or

from Reed on the work being done to optimize the campaign's database architecture might be an even bigger draw. That's likely especially true in the country's technology hot spots, and that's where the Obama's band of technologists has thus far been deployed. In early March in Austin, the campaign held a $500-a-head fundraiser at Six Lounge during the technology segment of SXSW. Goff and Reed were joined by both deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter and former U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra, according to the Sunlight Foundation's Political Party Time project, which collects and posts campaign event invitations. In midFebruary Goff and Rospars hosted an event at Hudson Terrace in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood. Thrown in conjunction with Gen44, the campaign's young people's project, tickets there started at 44 bucks and went up to $1,000, at which point the purchaser became an official co-chair of the event. In late January, Goff, Reed, and Bracy hosted a fundraiser at San Francisco's Founders Den, a SoMa working space and private club. Thirty dollars got donors into a panel reception, and $500 gave them access to a "small roundtable discussion" starting an hour and a half earlier. (The Obama campaign wasn't interested in commenting on this sort of thing. While Sunlight's Political Party Time doesn't capture the entire universe of campaign-fundraiser invitations, a search for digital staffers from the Romney campaign doesn't return results.) Even more than your average chance to financially support the candidate of your choice, there's something for everyone involved to love about these tech world funders. For the geeks, who love nothing better than process, there's a bit of fundraising psychology at work: A chance to get the real "inside perspective" on the Obama campaign's operations is an appealing prospect, as is the chance to participate in a roundtable discussion that might address not only tech practice, but technology and information policy. And there are other elbows worth rubbing in the room. The 60 or so co-chairs of the Obama campaign's Technology for Obama national committee includes such tech industry business leaders like LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman, Salesforce's Marc Benioff, and eBay's John Donahoe. Moreover, that list includes about a dozen venture capitalists who have shown themselves willing to dedicate considerable sums to promising technologies. In fact, that sort of company might prove to be a perk for entrepreneurial campaign staffers themselves. The Obama tech group has already served as something of a start-up incubator, and many of the VC-funded political tech companies people are paying attention to at the moment -- like NationalField, Electionear, and Amicus -- intersected with Obama's 2008 run in one way or another. The Obama campaign's gathering of tech staffers, funders, advisers, and volunteers is shaping up to form one of the more active corners of the technology world, with relationships that don't need to end come election day. It would be crediting the upstart circa-2007 Obama operation with an implausible amount of foresight to think that they jumped onto the Internet with historic vigor so that they might tap their tech team's fundraising potential in 2012. But, for them, the fact that it's playing out that way is a happy accident of the networked world. Tapping Wall Street for dollars is proving challenging this time around, with Obama's policies and rhetoric weighing him down in the financial world. In the tech world, however, he's enjoying nearly a mirror-image reputation, what with his administration coming against the much-disliked SOPA and PIPA online copyright bills and his recent aggressive opposition to a big cybersecurity bill just as Silicon Valley and others in the tech world were starting to fully sour on it. Both Democrats and Republicans have been making pilgrimages to Silicon Valley of late, but that sort of attention has been proving particularly fruitful for Obama. According to OpenSecrets, Obama has raised $2.4 million from sources in the computer and Internet industries, against Romney's $800,000. Some of that has come through splashy fundraisers, like

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's September event where people paid as much as $35,800 per couple to hang out with the president himself. Sandberg even had an actual rockstar -- Lady Gaga -- to offer donors. In Brooklyn tonight, Goff and Rospars will have to do. For plenty of people, they'll do better Alas, this evening's tech fundraiser is, says the campaign, closed to the press. That said, PowerHouse does have glass walls. Huffington Post: Barack Obama, Mitt Romney Embrace Social Media to Court Women Voters http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/03/obama-romney-social-media-women_n_1475221.html Ariel Edwards-Levy May 3, 2012 Social media sites Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are critical for reaching women for the campaigns of both President Barack Obama and challenger Mitt Romney, according to a social media monitoring firm. The candidates' online mentions of women were tracked by the website Meltwater Election Buzz, which found 38,000 tweets using the hashtag #waronwomen in April alone. Kimling Lam, an analyst for Meltwater Group, has been tracking the campaigns online since November. She said women's issues rose to the forefront as Mitt Romney cleared the Republican field and began focusing on the general election. "We've really seen the change once Santorum dropped out of the race. We're seeing the candidates really vying for the female vote," Lam told The Huffington Post. Nearly 9 percent of Obama's Twitter feed and 8 percent of Romney's mentioned women's issues over the last month. On April 6, Obama's campaign sent eight consecutive tweets from his speech at the White House Forum on Women and the Economy, including a quote, "'Is it possible that Congress would get more done if there were more women in Congress? That is almost guaranteed.' President Obama" While Obama's tweets were largely positive statements, Romney's tweets criticized the president's record. "How about the facts: Women account for 92.3% of jobs lost under @BarackObama," he tweeted in April, linking to an infographic. The candidates' wives are playing a role as well. Ann Romney's Twitter debut came shortly after Democratic adviser Hilary Rosen said Ann Romney "had never worked a day in her life," causing a flap that largely played out online. Michelle Obama, whose tweets often address women's issues, responded, "Every mother works hard, and every woman deserves to be respected." Ann Romney also has an account on Pinterest, which has a 97 percent female user base and features family snapshots, recommendations for books and recipes, and a display of patriotic photos. The Obama campaign on Thursday morning released "The Life of Julia," an online tool highlighting his record on women's issues. By early afternoon, it had been tweeted more than 2,000 times.

NPR: That New Friend You Made on Facebook? He Might Be Named Mitt or Barack http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/05/03/151879422/that-new-friend-you-made-on-facebook-he-

might-be-named-mitt-or-barack/ Brian Naylor May 3, 2012 As the presidential campaigns refocus on November, they're zeroing in on digital domains. In fact, the Obama campaign has spent six times as much money advertising online as it has on TV so far, though that's certain to change. And Republicans are fighting back with a new Facebook app called the "Social Victory Center." (You have to be a Facebook user to access the site.) "Politics is inherently social. You know, we have a strategy and a way to win, so it made a lot of sense for us to go to Facebook and not build this on GOP.com or a website or something like that, especially with Facebook's platform, which is all about sharing," says Andrew Abdel-Malik, who is a part of the Republican National Committee's digital team. The app allows users to read articles selected by the GOP, watch videos and download materials. It also lets users in nonswing states, say California, help out by calling potential voters in places that will be highly contested, like Ohio. Equally important for Republicans, users are sharing data with the party: their names, addresses, phone numbers and interests, says Abdel-Malik. "Every article, every video, everything is tagged. ... Whether it's an economy article or debt, so on and so forth. ... Whatever it might be, we can collect those data points. And that's where things really start to get interesting," he says. The Obama campaign set the template for online engagement with voters four years ago, with its MyBarackObama app. Republicans are playing catchup, says Micah Sifry of the Personal Democracy Forum. Sifry edits a blog on how politicians use the Web. He says campaigns on both sides are tapping into a wealth of personal data and raising privacy concerns. "If you sign up to use one of these campaign apps on Facebook, you're given a little warning that says this app is now going to find out everything that you've made public about yourself on Facebook, as well as the names and IDs of all your friends," says Sifry. Patrick Ruffini, president of the Republican online consulting firm Engage, says the Republican National Committee is smart to use a Facebook app to reach out to voters. "We've long known that the most powerful thing in determining how you'll be influenced to vote is a recommendation from a friend," Ruffini says. "And the ability to see in your Facebook news stream somebody taking action on behalf of a campaign who's a trusted connection of yours is something that everybody who's going to be active this year is going to want to look to harness." The campaigns are very interested in where we go online, whether it's Facebook or a news site. And if you've ever wondered how campaign banner ads seem to pop up on every site you visit, blame one of those little data markers in your browser, the cookie. Visit a campaign website, Sifry says, and you get a cookie, which gets shared with other websites you visit.

"The cookie that they've placed on your site from visiting their website is telling those other websites, 'Hey, this is a person who visited the Barack Obama website; let's show them one of those Obama ads,' " says Sifry. Sifry says there is a danger of a backlash, that voters might feel they're being stalked by a campaign. Nevertheless, the Obama campaign has spent almost $19 million for online advertising already, compared with a little more than $3 million on TV ads. One reason the Obama campaign is spending so much on the Web now is to rekindle the online relationships it had four years ago with the 13 million or so email addresses it collected. At the same time, Romney has had to concentrate on winning primaries. But as Sifry points out, great tools don't elect candidates; you still need a great candidate with a great message. Still, in a close race, using data gathered online to turn out a few more of your voters could make the difference. Los Angeles Times: Republicans expand Facebook efforts with Social Victory Center http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/01/news/la-pn-republicans-expand-facebook-efforts-with-socialvictory-center-20120501 Morgan Little May 1, 2012 WASHINGTON -- The Republican National Committee launched a new social media hub Tuesday, building on established RNC efforts and Facebooks open graph to create the Social Victory Center. The Facebook app, the first of its kind in the political sector, seeks to create a similar social, procedural and effectual experience to that of the physical Victory Centers scattered across the country. Built with the goal of going where its audiences already exist and spend a sizable amount of their time (users average six to seven hours a month on Facebook), Kristen Kukowski, press secretary at the RNC, said the hub was conceptualized by less political, more tech-minded people. What we want to do is help enhance what other departments do, she said, citing how functions of the online center can bring in money to aid fundraising, increase voter turnout and volunteerism and amplify the communications teams message. After granting the standard privacy permissions to the app, a process nothing on Facebook is complete without, users are presented with a series of news updates from the RNC, with a menu of select articles and, most importantly, the activities and reading habits of other friends of the victory center. Andrew Abdel-Malik, a member of the RNCs digital team, portrayed the victory center as an enhancement of current campaign norms. Politics is inherently social by nature, he said. The limitation was once that much of it depended on personal interactions, with the word of mouth being spread by individuals talking and campaigning to each other. The Social Victory Center aims for an amplification of those natural activities. Abdel-Malik emphasized the sharing notifications in particular. Citing that each member of Facebook has an average of 261 friends, every shared interaction on the victory center has the chance of expanding across

that immediate friend network, then to another network and beyond. From articles read, events attended or campaign efforts aided, theres a wide breadth of activities that can be shared. One feature, phone from home, enables those in noncontentious states to easily make calls on behalf of the RNC to battleground states like Ohio or Florida in hopes of persuading voters one by one. The success of the center and other digital ventures could be vital for the GOP as it works to improve upon its online efforts during the 2008 election, when President Obamas campaign all but dominated social networks. Four years is a long time in the digital realm, and the online playing field has since shifted dramatically. Mashable: Republicans launch Facebook app to defeat Obama http://mashable.com/2012/05/01/republicans-facebook-app/ Alex Fitzpatrick May 1, 2012 When it comes to social media, the oft-heard narrative of the 2012 election season is that the Democrats are the social party, and are more adept at using platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. The Republicans, however, are trying to turn that logic on its head. The Grand Old Party opened up a new media salvo with Tuesdays launch of its Social Victory Center, billed as a one-stop-online-shop for Republican voters to organize, plan events and volunteer in local, state and national elections. And its all baked directly into a Facebook app, allowing the GOP to capitalize on the relationships that users on the social network have already built with one another. With the Social Victory Center, we are revolutionizing the way activists and volunteers participate in Republican campaigns, said RNC Chairman Reince Priebus in a statement. Were breaking down geographic borders and connecting users to a nationwide grassroots network and a wealth of political resources. Users first register with a Facebook profile, and input additional informaiton such as their ZIP code and phone number. Then, theyre greeted by the news section, which features the latest Republican web ads and an assortment of Republican-friendly news stories, the selection of which depends on users location (a voter in Maine is going to see Maine-centric stories). The three other sections, events, discussions and volunteer, are focused on building a community of active, engaged voters. Events automatically shows nearby Republican events and candidate headquarters in a users neighborhood on the easy-to-read and familar Google Maps platform. It also allows users to schedule their own event, such as a telephone drive, and invite local Republican supporters to join in. The discussions section has been designed as a place to get Republican voters talking with one another about the issues that matter to them, whether thats the economy, gun control or student loans. This pages goal is to connect voters with similar interests and make them feel their voices are being heard by the campaign and other voters. Finally, volunteer is where the real social meat and potatoes lie. The section is built to get people off Facebook and into a local Victory Center (the Republican name for local field offices) to directly engage with a campaign. As with events, it builds a map based on users ZIP codes and shows them the address and contact information for these local outposts.

But what if a volunteer has an extra 30 minutes in his or her day and cant make it to a local field office? No problem users can make phone calls to registered voters through the app and their personal phone. The Social Victory Center is built around Facebooks Open Graph technology, the same code that powers apps such as Mashables Social Reader. Any interactions that one user has with a piece of news, video or anything else on the platform will be shared deep into their social graphs, expanding the GOPs reach and visibility. The app will also feel comfortable to users, the Republicans new media team says, because people are already familiar with Facebook and its myriad apps. Republicans built the app on Facebook instead of on their homepage, GOP.com, partially for that reason. Theres a huge comfort level there, especially with the use of *social graph+ applications over the last couple of months we saw a spike with things like Spotify and The Washington Post Social Reader, said RNC digital director Tyler Brown. People are comfortable with this. The Social Victory Center, Republican leaders believe, will give the party the edge it needs in both the online and offline race to the White House. The SVC, which leverages the technology of Facebook and Eventbrite, will give Republicans a distinct advantage in this campaign, said RNC Political Director Rick Wiley. Would you engage with a political campaign on a Facebook app? Tell us in the comments. BuzzFeed: Republicans Play Tech Catch-Up http://www.buzzfeed.com/zekejmiller/republicans-play-tech-catch-up Zeke Miller May 1, 2012 The Republican National Committee plans Tuesday to hold a press conference about its new Facebook app a sign of progress, and a the same time a mark of the enduring chip on Republican shoulders over the perceived Democratic online advantage. In 2008, what insiders described to BuzzFeed as an underfunded Republican web operation watched in envy as candidate Barack Obama built a huge online organization and raised hundreds of millions of dollars on the Web and got treated by the media like he had invented the Internet. Now Republicans, still playing technological catch-up to a high-tech Obama machine despite the energetic online conservative grassroots, is hoping to cut into both the Democrats advantage and the Republican inferiority complex. Republicans are also hoping that the broad shift from portals to search to social platforms led by Facebook and Twitter offers an opportunity to pull even with Democrats. Republicans in 2008 had less resources than Democrats, because on our side it was secondary, Romney campaign digital director Zac Moffat told BuzzFeed. Now, our target voters are on Facebook and Twitter, and were going where they are. In 2008 Facebook was populated by a surrogate army of teenagers and twenty-somethings ready to take Obamas message and organize around it. Today women over the age of 55 are the fastest-growing demographic on the more ideologically balanced, and gigantic, social service.

But Republican digital operatives remain intensely conscious of the perception that theyre laggards, a sore spot that was prodded when the trade publication ClickZ last week described the RNCs 2008 efforts as lackluster. Liz Mair, the RNCs online communications director in 2008, launched what else but a Twitter campaign with the hashtag #lackluster to rebut the articles assertion. The Republican strategy in 2008 was aimed at a broad audience, with a focus on popular portals like AOL and Yahoo to drive the national conversation. "I look at the universe of some of the sites that have fallen out of favor that still have audiences that anyone would be attracted to audiences in the hundreds of millions," the RNCs 2008 eCampaign director, Cyrus Krohn, told POLITICO in 2007, referring to sites like YouTube and MySpace as fads." Korhn told BuzzFeed on Monday that his plan to focus on Internet titans was an effort unfulfilled, and that plans to pair digital records with voter databases were hamstrung by a lack of resources. We were outspent by leaps and bounds in digital infrastructure and marketing preventing true success, he said. And some GOP digital operatives question whether the type of grassroots engagement Obama pioneered in 2008 was even possible for Republicans, pointing to the gap between the medium and the messenger. Obama was a community organizer, so it's not too surprising that the really innovative portion of his digital stuff was to do with organizing people, she said. McCain was the guy who always seemed to be on Meet the Press and doing townhalls, so it's perhaps not surprising that much of the most innovative stuff on our side was more communication-driven/oriented. Mairs job was focused on online outreach engaging in a Twitter debate about tech policy and using blogs like BlogHer and other networks that have been supplanted by Facebook to reach women. If I was trying to reach women online now, Id be on Pinterest, she said, highlighting it as an example of a rapidly changing web. The former RNC staffers defense of their work was cheered on by many of their counterparts across the aisle, who may also have seen an opportunity to jab their current rivals. In 08 they ran an actual online program and they were focused on getting the message out online, former Democratic National Committee digital strategist Kombiz Lavasany told BuzzFeed. We actually paid attention to what they were doing. Thats not the case right now. The new RNC app is designed to be more bottom-up on the Obama model, existing on Facebook rather than the campaign website and built to allow supporters to call voters in swing states, share news with their friends, and find nearby campaign events. This wasnt even possible for us four years ago, RNC communications director Sean Spicer told BuzzFeed, noting that Facebook was limited to .edu addresses (and thus a more-Democratic-leaning user base) until 2006.

But Democrats are still confident in the superiority of their digital strategy, with one Obama aide questioning why its news that the RNC is matching the Democrats capabilities four years later. The Romney campaign and the RNC are just playing catch-up with the Obama campaign four years ago, said Matt Ortega, a 2008 DNC digital staffer. Breitbart: RNC to Unveil Social Victory Center for 2012 Online Campaign http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/04/30/Exclusive-RNC-to-Unveil-Social-Victory-Center-for2012-Online-Campaign Tony Lee April 30, 2012 Four years ago, Brittany Cohan (above), the Republican National Committees social media coordinator, was barely active in politics when then-candidate Barack Obama was using social media to turn online enthusiasm for him into money and votes. Four years later, Cohan is at the nerve center of national politics, helping the RNC combat Democrats online. Cohan serves as the RNCs ambassador to the blogging community in addition to helping the RNC shape its narrative, take apart liberal ones, and swiftly respond to attacks from Democrats. She uses Twitter and Facebook as her political battlefields, providing her online allies with ammunition they can use to defeat Democrats. And on Tuesday, Cohan will get more institutional air cover to help her engage the online community when the RNC unveils its Social Victory Center Facebook application. Screenshots of the innovative tool, provided exclusively to Breitbart News, can be seen above and below. The Social Victory Center is the brainchild of Andrew Abdel-Malik, who works in RNCs political department. Abdel-Malik told Breitbart News the Facebook application will be like a virtual Facebook field office because the application allows those who sign up for it to do many of things people can do at their local GOP headquarters. People can use the app for phone banking, to download state-specific infographics they can take to the PTA or hand out in their neighborhoods, and to share news items and talking points with fellow online activists. He said what makes the Facebook field office potentially more powerful--and influential--is it eliminates geographical boundaries and allows the RNC to engage volunteers at home. The application serves as a virtual one-stop shop for political activists. No matter who you are, or where you are, you get to be a key player because of this application, AbdelMalik said. Just four years ago, Cohan was barely involved in politics. A Republican operative, Marc Ross, encouraged her to join Twitter while she was volunteering for the McCain 2008 presidential campaign. But Cohan, who tweets actively and engagingly at @bccohan, did not fully embrace Twitter until a year later, when Tea Partiers she met at a 2009 rally convinced her to be more active on Twitter.

She plunged into the world of Twitter, and her online street fighting was noticed by political operatives, which led to jobs on a Wisconsin Senate campaign and in the office of Sen. John Thune (R-SD) before she came to the RNC in 2011, shortly after Reince Priebus was elected as its Chairman. Cohan joined the RNC as Twitter was emerging as the place where the first draft of history was being written and fought over, and she says the GOP is better at getting its message amplified online than Democrats. I would rather have 2,000 followers that are actively engaged with everything thats posted than 2,000,000 that dont help amplify a message Cohan said. Far too many people get bogged down with statistics and forget that social media is about personally relating with people. You cant fake a relationship with your follower base, and I think thats why the GOP dominates especially on Twitter. The priority given to Abdel-Maliks innovative idea and the swift rise of social media maestros like Cohan in the political ranks reflect how important media like Twitter are in forming and combating narratives. Priebus has held receptions at RNC headquarters with bloggers and had multiple conference calls with social media influencers. RNC communications director Sean Spicer has embraced using social media as part of his broader communications strategy. His deputy communications director, Tim Miller, who was formerly the press secretary for the failed presidential bid of Jon Huntsman, was ahead of the curve in using Twitter during the 2012 election cycle and is a fierce online combatant. Spicer told Breitbart News that social media and blogger outreach is a central and critical piece of our messaging, because countless issues, stories and narratives are generated from the blogs and social media, which forces the mainstream media to address these issues. Cohan calls this trickle up journalism, and she will play a central role in accelerating the trickling up of information from the grassroots to the top echelons of the 2012 campaign. Her credibility and network with the leaders in social media and blogs has been invaluable, Spicer said. Many times our messaging strategy begins with her getting the word out through her network to begin to drive a strong narrative. We are better, faster and stronger because of her efforts. And the Social Victory Center will make Cohan--and the RNC--even more formidable online. Alaska Dispatch: Epic Social Media Ware Expected in Presidential Campaigns http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/epic-social-media-war-expected-presidential-campaigns Gloria Goodale April 26, 2012 A new campaign by the liberal political action group MoveOn.org to place an ad on the Facebook page of every college student in the US is the opening shot of what some experts are calling a truly epic war." The result, they say, will see social-media use in Election 2012 become far more savvy and sophisticated than it was four years ago. The campaign, launching this week, starts with the student loan issue. MoveOn.org is raising money to target every potential youth vote with an interest in keeping loan rates from doubling in July. This is a curtain raiser for what to expect in the general election this year, says Kevin Phelan, managing director for North America at the Meltwater Group, a social media monitoring software firm in Boston.

While social media have been playing ever-larger roles in political campaigns, the technology available today versus four years ago is so advanced that the battle waged by the two camps should be epic, he adds. A key priority is a steadily increasing ability to microtarget potential voters as well as supporters and influencers the social media-savvy partisans who can be leveraged for their wide-ranging contacts, says Mr. Phelan. His firm has spent the past year working with some 100 different companies, all prepping for this final push. he says, noting advancements in "social media monitoring," known as CRM, to gather passionate advocates and analytics will allow these digital natives to stay behind the scenes but still have a major impact on the election and media. The explosion of companies devoted to scraping, whereby computers gather and collate the tiniest bit of information about online activities, has allowed them to create a digital profile for virtually every Internet user, he says. So, if you have 600 friends and you have mentioned even once that you support Obama, for instance, that campaign has the ability to track and target you in virtually your every online move to determine how and when you might be useful in getting their word out, he says. It may not be things we havent dreamt of, says David Jackson, associate political science professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, but it will be much more sophisticated than we have seen before. The pressure to evolve new strategies is a direct result of the way users adapt to being targeted. Our filters are getting savvier alongside technology, he says, so companies have to continually get more creative for us to get the message. He points to President Obamas appearance on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" on Tuesday a show that engages online users as well as traditional broadcast viewers. It was not enough for the president to simply be interviewed on the show. he says: "He was actually integrated into the entertainment, performing in one of the shows regular sequences, "Slow-Jam-The-News." We will see new methods of interacting with voters, learning from them and offering new ways to get involved and share their support, says Anthony Rotolo, professor of social media at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies in New York, via e-mail. Expect to see both candidates attempt to leverage social media data with the potential of offering a realtime understanding of how the public feels on any issue or how candidates are doing at any given moment in a region, he adds. While there is a notable social media disparity between President Obama and GOP presumptive nominee Mitt Romney perhaps most visible on their Facebook accounts, where Romney has under 2 million likes to Obama's more than 26 million the playing field has evened in unexpected ways since 2008, says Mr. Rotolo. In the last few years, he points out, other demographics have joined sites like Facebook, Twitter, and new networks like Pinterest in much larger numbers. This presents an opportunity for Mr. Romney to leverage social media to reach audiences who were not as accustomed to interacting in this way on social networks during the 2008 campaign, he says.

CNN: RNC looks to Facebook for political edge http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/04/20/rnc-looks-to-facebook-for-political-edge/ Peter Hamby April 20, 2012 Scottsdale, Arizona (CNN) Tapping into the online social networks of voters is a top priority for the digital strategists working for President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney - and no site offers a larger trove of personal data than Facebook. Now the Republican National Committee is getting into the social media game. The party organization, which has the mammoth task of turning out Republican voters in every battleground state this November, is preparing to launch a new Facebook tool that lets users share news, talking points and the latest updates about the presidential campaign with their friends. But the GOP Social Victory Center, which has been in development for almost a year and will be released next week, lets Republicans go far beyond just clicking like on a story about Joe Bidens most recent gaffe or the latest veepstakes chatter. Republicans using the application will be able do the work usually reserved for campaign offices simply by logging into Facebook from their personal computers, party officials told CNN in a briefing about the new technology at this weeks RNC meeting in Arizona. We will be finding people and engaging them and letting them do the things that can elect a president, or members of the House or Senate, without actually having to walk into a victory center, RNC Political Director Rick Wiley said. That was an untapped resource for us. People who sign up for the application will be able to share news pumped directly into their profiles from the RNCs communications office in Washington. They can fill out and submit absentee ballot applications, see early voting deadlines, donate to the party or inform their friends about upcoming campaign events using Eventbrite all while never leaving Facebook. And simply by clicking a button, a users phone will ring and automatically re-connect them, via RNC headquarters, to targeted voters in key states. Its erasing the geographic boundaries, Wiley told CNN. Just because you dont live in a battleground state doesnt mean you cant help defeat this president. Crucially, though, the application is also designed to help the RNC flesh out their carefully-maintained voter files by mining the basic personal information of every Facebooker using the application, allowing GOP researchers to curate the interests and personal preferences of thousands upon thousands of voters. When a user authorizes the RNC app - you have to authorize Spotify to tap into your Facebook account before listening to Lady Gaga or Radiohead, for instance - the party is able to access the users email address, phone number, religion and gender along with the friends in his or her social network. Thats extraordinarily valuable information for political operatives eager to tailor specific messages to targeted voters. The data we are going to get, its going to be much better than we ever had in the past, said RNC spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski.

The new application is part of a larger effort by Republicans to catch up with the Obama campaigns impressive digital footprint and advanced data collection efforts. To that end, the RNC will begin moving digital directors into 12 battleground states beginning in June. Campaigns & Elections: If You Build It, They Might Not Come http://www.campaignsandelections.com/campaign-insider/316962/if-you-build-it-they-might-notcome.thtml Sean Miller April 19, 2012 Open graph Facebook apps can improve engagement online, if they're maintained Looking for a new way to gather information on potential supporters? Facebook applications, which create online niche communities, could be the answer. Mitt Romney, for instance, had a Facebook application, or app, that automatically filled in the name, email address, location, birthday and gender of those signing up for the campaign's email list. "Rather than making people fill in a bunch of field forms to sign up for your email list, they can just click to register," says Katie Harbath, a public policy manager with Facebook. A subscriber who signs up through the splash page on the Romney campaign website, meanwhile, only has to provide a zip code. But open graph apps, which are created by third parties and added to a user's profile voluntarily, aren't an online field of dreams, says Harbath, speaking at C&Es CampaignTech conference on Thursday. Just building an app doesn't mean that users will engage with it. "You need to put a lot of effort into marketing them," Harbath says. "We have an 80-20 rule. Of the budget you have, 20 percent should go to actually building the app and 80 percent should actually go to promoting the application." Once elected, lawmakers can use apps to foster "genuine involvement in the legislative process," according to Matt Lira, director of new media in House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's office. The Virginia Republican recently unveiled Citizen Cosponsor," a downloadable Facebook app, which allows users to follow bills through the legislative process. Along the same line, the White House has a "We the People" app that allows users to create or sign onto a petition. "If a petition meets the signature threshold, it will be reviewed by the Administration and we will issue a response," according to the White House. "Both 'We the People' and 'Citizen Cosponsor' are designed so that you not only receive information about what the updates are, but that you're given continual opportunities to engage in the legislative process," Lira says. Meanwhile, if your campaign isn't ready for its own app, Harbath had some advice for generating traffic on a regular Facebook page. "We highly recommend that you encourage comments," she says. "I know that can be scary for a lot of campaigns. But [by] allowing a discussion to go on, you're going to have a lot more traffic and vibran[cy] on the page than if you try to have it all just be straight up positive content, or not really much discussion.

Helena Independent Air: Hopefuls Embrace Social Media http://helenair.com/news/state-and-regional/govt-and-politics/hopefuls-embrace-socialmedia/article_090d70b8-8206-11e1-90e5-0019bb2963f4.html Charles Johnson April 9, 2012 When Republican Corey Stapleton wanted to have daily, interactive conversations with Montanans about issues in the governors race, he turned to Facebook, where people can share information on the Internet. Its a virtual coffee shop, every day, the former state senator said. The only difference between me and everyone else is I get to start the conversation. When Democratic Attorney General Steve Bullock officially announced he was running for governor and later when he named his running mate, he let thousands of supporters know first by videos posted on YouTube and linked to his Facebook page. You get to communicate directly with voters and fellow Montanans and create a more personal connection, but youre also able to talk with voters in every part of the state, said Bullocks campaign manager, Kevin OBrien. Home at his farm near Big Sandy last week, U.S. Sen. Jon Tester provided brief snippets known as tweets from his Twitter account about his time on the tractor and other topics. They were linked to the Democrats blog and photos of him planting crops. To get the word out about a favorable poll in his hotly contested race against Tester, Republican U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg broadcast it on Twitter last week. Montana campaigns are widely using social media and networking tools such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to keep in touch with voters via the Internet on computers or smart phones. These are additional weapons in their campaign arsenals, besides such traditional ones as going door-to-door, calling voters or sending direct mail. While social networking wasnt new in 2008, many analysts agreed its use played a critical role in Democrat Barack Obamas victory over Republican John McCain for president. Like a lot of web innovators, the Obama campaign did not invent anything completely new, David Carr, New York Times media and culture columnist, wrote shortly after the 2008 election. Instead, by bolting together social networking applications under the banner of a movement, they created an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote that helped them topple the Clinton machine and then John McCain and the Republicans. On campaign Facebook pages, other users can say they like that person or campaign. That entitles them to receive regular updates from the campaigns on Facebook and comment or ask questions of the candidates. Stapletons campaign Facebook page registered the most likes of all Montana candidates more than the other eight governor campaigns from both parties combined, he says according to a State Bureau check one day last week. Tester was second at 5,583. These totals change by the minute.

We put a lot of material out on Facebook, said Rehbergs campaign spokesman Chris Bond Its a great way to interact with people, and they have an opportunity to interact. Bond said social media are certainly will be part of the campaigns strategy, but not the most important part. It can be a really cost-effective way to get out a message to targeted folks, he said. The difficult thing to tell about it is: are you reaching new people or reaching folks who already have strong opinions, either for or against you. Testers Senate campaign will make full use of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr, a photo-sharing service, as a very important part of the race, said staffer Max Croes. In 2006, Jon and his campaign really broke some new ground in the use of social media, Croes said. Social media are always evolving and changing. He said the campaign likes to share photos on Facebook of anyone getting a flat-top haircut to match Testers or display letters by people writing about the senator. Its about Montanans telling the story about how Jon is a Montana farmer with Montana values who represents them, Croes said. Stapleton said he prefers Facebook finding Twitter less valuable because its too one-way. Everyone in Montana can have a Facebook account, he said. Its free. Its the easiest way to be accessible for ordinary, everyday people. Stapleton said hes resisted suggestions that he not spend so much time on Facebook. I have always felt what was absent in the cyber world is conservative commentary on issues, Stapleton said. My site has sort of become a forum for that as long as theyre respectful. The other thing he likes about social media is that if people see something they like, they can share it with other folks, who in turn can share it with their friends and so on. Thats force multiplier, in military lingo, said Stapleton, a retired Navy officer. From my guesstimation, there will be 15,000-20,000 voters that will know me on June 5, who like me and support me who might not otherwise have had access. Bullock was talking to some people when one man pulled out his cell phone, signed up for the campaigns email alerts, volunteered to help and contributed $50 to Bullock, all electronically in a matter of a few minutes, OBrien said. Technology obviously is changing everyones personal life and business life, and its changing the way politics is done, Bullocks campaign manager said. I dont know that any of the old ways arent being used anymore, but technology gives us many more ways to communicate with voters. Brock Lowrance manager of Republican Rick Hills governors campaign, agreed that social media tools supplement but dont replace traditional campaign activities.

One way we utilize social media is to fundraise online, he said. Its an efficient way to supplement our ongoing efforts, and its an easy way for people to make a financial contribution. Democrat Rob Stutz, whos not taking special-interest money in his low-budget congressional race, relies heavily on social media. Its incredibly valuable, he said. Montanas such a huge state geographically. Its a very effective way for getting information out to a large audience at low cost. Stutz said his campaign has put particular emphasis on posting videos online. His campaign videotaped and later posted all Democratic House candidates answers at a Bozeman debate to a question about where they stood on the Keystone Pipeline. Weve taken this information that was previously available to 100 people (at the debate) and made it available to everyone in the world, Stutz said. But it was targeted to people that are paying attention to the House race. Daily Beast: How a Tweet Can Beat a Pac: Social Media Gives Voters Muscle in Politics http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/01/how-a-tweet-can-beat-a-pac-social-media-gives-votersmuscle-in-politics.html Mark McKinnon April 1, 2012 Six words transmitted wirelessly late in the evening of Nov. 7, 2000, foretold an event that forever changed American politics. Campaign manager Donna Brazile sent Al Gore a message on his BlackBerry 850, still relatively new technology that the Bush campaign did not have. That message: Never surrender. Its not over yet. Those six words, sent on a hunch, were later followed by an email from the campaign team with more specific information on the Florida vote count. The presidential nominee of the Democratic Party then withheld his official concession, and the election of 2000 entered the history books as the most contentious yet in modern times. As the chief media advisor for George W. Bushs campaign, I dont think I can ever forget the impact of those six words. Though Gore was an early adopter of technology, even he could not foresee the impact of social media on politics today. Back then, the BlackBerry was little more than a two-way pager with a keyboard. Only 54 million U.S. households had a computer; just 44 million had online access. And the words tweet, friend, and follow had altogether different meanings: Facebook was not introduced until 2004, YouTube, 2005, and Twitter, 2006. Fast forward to today, and we are all connectedall the time. In the United States, there are around 250 million Internet users, over 100 million smartphone users, 133 million Facebook users and over 24 million Twitter users. This ubiquitous access to online devices and social networking channels has had a democratizing effect. Americans are leveraging technology to more fully engage in the political process.

Fully 73 percent of adult Internet users went online to get news or information about the 2010 elections. Some 22 percent used Twitter or social networking sites in the months leading up to the midterms to connect to campaigns or the election itself. And this year, over 1.6 million watched President Obamas reelection campaign film, The Road Weve Traveled, on YouTube in just five days. And though a Hollywood-produced online biopic is a first in campaign history, it is unsurprising coming from Barack Obama, whose 2008 campaign was the first in the Internet age. Masters of leveraging technology four years ago, Obama for America already has spent more than $11 million on Web ads and text messages this election season. And President Obama, who leads the four GOP presidential contenders in Twitter followers, mentions and retweets, has now joined Pinterest, the newest social network which lets people pin photos to a virtual bulletin board. Despite Obamas networking prowess, Republican candidates and voters caught up with Democrats in deploying social media during the 2010 elections; Buddy Roemer was the most retweeted GOP candidate on Twitter in 2011; and Republican members of Congress now use Twitter more effectively than Democrats, as measured by the number of followers and retweets, and the use of hashtags, pictures and videos. But for all its advantages in engaging voters, the 24/7 nature of social media means the candidateand the pressureis always on. Gaffes now travel near the speed of light, the damage amplified exponentially with each repost. And a viral video or sexted photo can instantly infect a political campaign or career, dooming it to a lingeringor mercifully rapiddeath. And voters have become more than just passive consumers of these digital messages. They now create the messages. The sit-back-and-watch audience is a relic of the past, says William Kuhns in his paper, The Fourth Voice: Life in the Age of the Self-Assembling Message. For tens of thousands of years, the oral voice governed every culture, writes Kuhns. That oral tradition of communication then gave way to the second voice, the written word with its enormous range. Then, with the advent of radio and television, a third voice was introducedthe corporate voice, the driver of mass consumerism. And each change in voice provoked staggering social and cultural transformations. Today a fourth voice has emerged, enabled by technology. Were vaguely aware of the difference in the many new conversations weve been joining, thanks to the World Wide Web, BlackBerry, Facebook, Twitter and other new media, notes Kuhns. Clearly, the first effect of our new native tongue is that we want to join in the new conversations burgeoning everywhere around us. The second effect observed by Kuhns, in my opinion, portends the greatest challenge for candidates and campaigns to manage: We trust the messages that have grown from these online conversations. For like conversation itself, this new native tongue is relentlessly democratic. Established authorities are undermined; users are now the experts. We see it everywhere in our culture, says Kuhns. Scripted cop shows and sit-coms have given way to unscripted documentaries and reality-TV shows. And team sports like soccer, that minimize the coached and rehearsed and instead celebrate the spontaneous and instantaneous, are growing in popularity. Its no surprise to me then that print newspapers have given way to user-generated blogs.

Though modern communication has always been guided by the implicit rule that coherence in a message grows from exerting control over it, the fourth voice emerges from a participatory process that is collective and messy. And with this new fourth voice, Kuhn concludes, the value of the communication experience has undergone a sea-change: from the need to share it, to the need to share in it. In my view, this is good for the American political process. Technology and social media have brought power back to the people. We the people can now compete against the near-deafening influence of unlimited campaign contributions. Our fourth voice can drive the conversation in the virtual town square. However, a recent study by Pew found the most active and engaged political participants on social networking sitesthose with the loudest voicetend to sit at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. Weve seen this in the growth of both the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street protests. Though there are risks of imbalance if the voices of those in the middle are muted, technology-enabled social networking has the potential to return power to all of the people. A messy participatory process is representative democracy at its best. And political change can happen again in under 140 characters. Whether texted, tweeted, posted or pinned, this is my message: Never surrender. Get engaged. Your voice matters. Buzzfeed: The Republican Party Wants to Be Your Friend on Facebook http://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpolitics/the-republican-party-wants-to-be-your-friend-on-fa March 30, 2012 The Republican National Committee is on the verge of a broad technical upgrade aimed at restoring the technical edge it held during the Bush years and at bringing the GOP into the social media era, Republican sources told BuzzFeed. Starting next week, the party will roll out an upgraded, and possibly renamed, version of Voter Vault, the giant, centralized file of data about voters that is centralized by the national party and used by Republican campaigns around the country, according to party officials and committee members. The party is also developing a set of "Social Victory" applications to integrate political campaigns deeper into voters' lives on the social web. "After six year of a much-needed technology upgrades, we have made some tremendous enhancements to Voter Vault," Republican National Committee Spokesman Sean Spicer told BuzzFeed. "We are excited that each of our state parties is going to be abel to enjoy the benefits of these upgrades." Spicer declined to discuss the details of the upgrades to Voter Vault, but sources said the move involve vastly expanding the amount and types of data that can be linked to more traditional information like voters' names, addresses, and phone numbers. The use of consumer information in targeting has expanded dramatically in recent years, and was used widely by candidate Barack Obama's campaign in 2008, as well as by Mitt Romney's primary campaign this year.

The RNC announced this week that it had "fully-funded" its $21 million "Presidential Trust," to be chaired by Rep. Paul Ryan, which can spend unlimited amounts independently of the presidential campaign and is expected to make extensive use of the new data, according to a member of the RNC. The data is also heavily used by state parties, and the timing of the transition drew complaints from Texas Republican Party Chairman Steve Munisteri, two Republican sources said, whose primary is on May 29. A spokesman for the Texas Republican Party declined to comment on the contract. But a national GOP source said state parties will have the alternative of switching to the upgraded system whenever they want, and the Voter Vault will not at any point switch off, and other state party officials said they were pleased with the shift. "We had the best Voter Vault in '04 with Rove," said one committee member. "Obama carried it to the Nth degree, and now Reince Priebus is getting us back up to speed." The Voter Vault upgrade is being managed by a vendor, FLS Connect, that was founded by RNC Chief-of-Staff Jeff Larson, producing some grumbling in Republican circles. But GOP officials and press reports say Larson no longer has any stake in the company. The RNC has, meanwhile, intensified its focus on social media, an area in which it had falled behind the Democrats. It has been accumulating thousands of Facebook "likes" a week to its Facebook page, and has narrowed the gap with the Democratic National Committee's Facebook page, which still has some 30,000 more fans. The RNC also changed its Twitter handle today, from @RNC to @GOP, part of the renewed focus on social media. Huffington Post: What the 2012 Presidential Candidates Can Learn from Socially Savvy Brands on Facebook http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roger-katz/2012-election-social-media_b_1388232.html Roger Katz March 29, 2012 As a marketer passionate about the huge potential of social marketing, whenever I see a marketing challenge, I almost always think to myself: "How could they solve that problem with social?" When fans love a brand, they're happy to talk it up and share stories about it on social networks. While we were taught by our mothers to be cautious when discussing religion and politics, we are increasingly sharing views on social networks that reveal how we think, which in turn influences our network of friends. Do the 2012 presidential candidates "get" social? The challenge of engaging with and inspiring a national community to rally behind a political candidate is really no different than any other marketing challenge. Step 1: Introduce and create an emotional connection with a brand/candidate. Step 2: Entertain, engage with relevant content, and make the experience fun. Step 3: Make sure the experience can be easily shared and spread, with as little friction as possible. Step 4: Rinse and repeat, while staying current, relevant and diverse. How do the remaining 2012 candidates stack up to this four-step approach? I decided to take a quick look and here's what I found on Facebook:

Barack Obama As the incumbent with an impressive 25.8 million fans, Obama's longer track record and experience on Facebook should give him a bit of an advantage. His team's track record on social was reflected in their immediate move to Facebook Timelines for business, where they incorporated fun and interesting Milestones. The Obama team used "gamification" in the leaderboard-style "Are You In" game that rewarded fans by telling them how many people were inspired to join the Obama campaign as a result of their wall post. This is a clever strategy and lends itself nicely to creating a viral experience. Obama needs to continue to engage that fan base. Mitt Romney Mitt Romney's team has accumulated 1.5 million fans throughout his campaign, using several tactics with mixed results. His team upgraded his Facebook page to the new Timeline look quickly, but neglected to tell the Romney story with "Milestones" or relevant history. Not acknowledging the importance of keeping things as frictionless as possible, Mitt's Facebook app, "Stand with Mitt," asks fans to go to exhaustive measures to show their allegiance. By requiring four steps for possible inclusion in a photo gallery on Facebook, supporters have to do too much work to show their support. On the plus side, the Romney campaign got a little more socially creative with the "What's your take?" app, which asks followers to answer various questions like "What is the key issue for you in 2012?" The app creates an open dialogue with mixed negative/positive comments and it's good to see the campaign managers have let negative comments stand. Moving forward, the Romney team should move towards simplicity to encourage as much broad-based support as possible. Rick Santorum It's no surprise that Rick Santorum has only 187 thousand Facebook fans, as he doesn't have much of an "inside" Facebook strategy, re-directs almost all links out of Facebook to other sites and has not yet upgraded to the new Facebook Timeline. The Santorum team also does little to provide a Facebook experience worth passing along to friends, essentially "retargeting" the same supporters. Also, while his team has cleverly built a "Santorisms" e-book, it was a wasted opportunity since they didn't make the e-book easy for fans to share and spread virally. Fans love sharing content that reflects their views, and photos in particular create a perfect opportunity for a social connection that can foster likes, comments and discussion. Newt Gingrich While Obama, Romney and Santorum were focused on building engagement and word of mouth, Newt Gingrich's use on Facebook has been focused on raising campaign funds. With only 296 thousand fans, Newt has to focus on getting those few supporters to spread the word easily and quickly.

Many of his pages send fans off Facebook, where they are likely to engage and share, to his site. Asking for name, email and location before spinning the fan off to www.newt.org, indicates absolutely no acknowledgement of the potential social power of Facebook to engage fans, and more importantly their friends, on Facebook. The Same Social Marketing Rules Apply to Brands and Candidates Alike The practice of social campaigns isn't new and candidates could learn a lot from Facebook heavy-hitters: Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Lady Gaga, Universal Pictures, Nickelodeon. The same lessons apply:

Keep social campaigns entertaining, simple and frictionless Create an environment that encourage supporters/fans work on your behalf to spread powerful online and offline word of mouth Engage fans in a conversation Be authentic Give fans great content to share Respect the context -- keep fans where they found you.

Politicians love to talk about "the power of the people," and crave photo opportunities where they are eating "down home" food and conversing with "real" people. But if they really want to tap into the power of the people, and get those people working on their behalf, social media sites is where it's happening. On a massive scale. The candidate that can harness that power has a better chance of spreading his winning message before, during and after November's election. The Hill: RNC Emphasizes Social Media in National Convention Plans http://thehill.com/blogs/twitter-room/other-news/218839-rnc-emphasizes-social-media-in-nationalconvention-plans Alicia Cohn March 23, 2012 The Republican National Convention announced a redesign for its official 2012 convention website on Wednesday and emphasized its plan to integrate social media into the national convention in August. "Our goal is to tear down the convention walls and make the 2012 Republican National Convention open and accessible to anyone, anywhere, the RNCs convention chief executive officer, William Harris, said in a press release. Harris also called the social media tools on the website one of the most vital assets in the RNCs plan to make this years convention the most innovative, dynamic and informative. "The redesigned website will provide an interactive experience to our web visitors while helping us build a community and make history," Director of Communications James Davis said in the release. The website includes a Digital Convention Hub with updates from Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus, and the ability to login through Facebook in order to customize the experience. The RNC plans to livestream events and host live chats on the website.

According to the RNC, the Virginia-based Campaign Solutions the consulting firm that also worked on the RNC's convention websites the last two cycles did the redesign and is helping craft digital strategy. TechPresident: Obama Campaign Opens Tech Field Office In San Francisco Thursday http://techpresident.com/news/21954/obama-campaign-opens-tech-field-office-san-francisco-thursday By Sarah Lai Stirland March 22, 2012 Campaign stickers for Barack Obama's re-election this year have already started popping up on cars all around San Francisco and many campaign events for volunteers have been organized lately in the Bay Area. So it comes as no surprise that the Obama campaign would further capitalize on the region's enthusiasm for the president by opening up a "tech field office." The campaign is formally opening up the South of Market Office Thursday evening with talks about Obama's tech initiatives, and is calling techies to come and bring their ideas and skills to volunteer for them. "Many supporters of the President have lent their time and talent to building the largest grassroots campaign in history," reads a note on an online sign-up sheet for volunteer coders. "Traditionally, this has always taken the form of volunteers talking to neighbors, phonebanking, canvassing, and hosting house meetings. We learned from 2008 that using the talents and skills of our supporters was key to building the most effective organization. Now were taking the next step by providing the opportunity for supporters in the technology community to help the campaign extend our current tools." There should be no shortage of talent, and in fact there should be a pretty strong local network since there are several veterans of the 2008 campaign now in the Bay area working on other projects. Human Events: Frontrunners Romney and Obama Intensify Their Social Media Efforts http://www.humanevents.com/2012/03/22/frontrunners-romney-and-obama-intensify-their-social-mediaefforts/ Al DiGuido March 22, 2012 It has become clear to virtually every individual that breathes oxygen that more and more citizens have found the Internet and venues like websites, Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere as their primary medium for insight, opinion and research. Data continues to show that network and cable television viewership is in decline. Nevertheless, political candidates and their affiliates will spend billions of dollars between now and Election Day on those conventional advertising venues in a vain attempt to shift the mindset of a group of folks that are probably more likely to be on the Internet than watching a 30-second spot on their local affiliate. Whats also clear from looking this week at the social media landscape, is that there is a new level of intensity and focus on social media by the true front runners in this raceMitt Romney and President Barack Obama. What is also readily apparent is that all of rhetorical jousting being done by the remaining candidatesNewt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and to a much lesser degree, Ron Paulis taking away from any real opportunity for momentum to be generated by the GOP standard bearer. Its clear that President Obamas machine is kicking it into higher gear as its views the inevitable winner of this prolonged primary season, Mitt Romney, in its cross hairs.

Despite a range of issues that should be negatively impacting the President and his re-election campaign, reelection candidate Obama is experiencing a surging and/or solidification of the base that won him the White House in the last election. Its very clear from this weeks data that the guys in Chicago were told to put the pedal to the metal and lets start cranking up our strategy online. After weeks of steady growth, President Obama surged this week. A performance that could be a precursor to the fall campaign and an early warning shot to Republicans to end this overhyped media love affair and get down to the business of winning the White House. Heres this weeks round-up. Facebook Friends Mitt Romney 1,541,160 UP 13,618 Ron Paul 916,723 UP 10,039 Newt Gingrich 296,296 UP 501 Rick Santorum 184,068 UP 8,434 President Barack Obama 25,732,604 UP 192,177 Mitt Romney Mitt is looking much more like the ordained candidate of the Party. He continues to see strong growth week in and week out while others are fading. Mitts page is much more engaging. One day last week he showed his human side, asking friends to wish him and his wife Happy Anniversary. Mitt continues to miss an opportunity though in stating his clear and concise vision for leading the country on these pages. As we head toward fall, he must clarify his views; attacking the other side will only get a candidate so far. Ron Paul While Ron continues to run a solid online campaign, my sense is that his message is losing steam even though his friends number rises each week. Right now his Facebook page is gushing about his appearance on Jay Leno last night. While doing a guest slot on the Leno show might be a good thing for a actor or starlet; right nowRon needs to figure out where he will wind up after the nominee is selected. Pauls camp has had a very strong effort online and the Romney camp would do well to join forces if possible. Newt Gingrich Cover blurb on Time magazine this week Quit Newt Quit says it all. I dont hear anyone dont count Newt out just yet. Newts performance on Facebook is the weakest one week total increase that I have seen since we started monitoring this race. There may be a lot of bark still left in the dog, but it is readily apparent that no one is listening. From a marketing and brand standpoint, the race is over for Gingrich. Rick Santorum There is little doubt that Rick is a solid competitor with a strong message. This may be a case that the candidate has run out of time. No one believes that the process need drag out to the Republican Convention. As challenging as Santorum feels a Romney candidacy would be, his attempt to delay the inevitable may result in further damage to the Republican challenge. Ricks friend base does grow each week; just not enough to matter. Twitter Followers Newt Gingrich 1,449,576 UP 4,982 Ron Paul 409,772 UP 17,345 Mitt Romney 385,992 UP 23,701

Rick Santorum 174,677 UP 19,659 President Barack Obama 13,143,775 UP 292,604 Newts Twitter Followers have grown modestly. Once again this week his increase lags the field putting him at the bottom of all candidates in terms of growth rates. Strong out of the gate; his brand and message isnt resonating with the audience any longer. Ron Paul Candidate Paul knows the Internet and despite not getting any serious attention or credibility from the mass media, Rons online followers continue to grow each week, placing him in second place behind Gingrich in total number of followers. Ron is ascending to the Gingrich decline. Its time for the Republican brass to take a hard look at the Ron Paul message and follower base and start figuring out how to bring them along to the bigger party in the near term. Romney out front Big week for Romney campaign on Twitter this week. Candidate is making a move on Ron Pauls second place slot and leading all others in growth week over week. Promising sign here is that Romneys message seems to be gaining the momentum required to make a significant stand within the Twitter platform. Little doubt that after the Illinois win, Romneys standing will only get stronger in the weeks ahead. Santorum up again Rick continues to benefit from press coverage around some of the more controversial topics on the campaign trail. He is most definitely looking for signature issues that will garner strong factions and segments amongst the electorate. This weeks stance on pornography is a case in point. Like the modest growth in Facebook, Santorums Twitter standing (in fourth place) shows that while the media may love the message, it hasnt garnered the support in the electorate required to be meaningful in a race when tens of millions of votes are required to win the prize. As you look at the numbers for President Obama, the only conclusion that one can reach is that the race has started in earnest. The growth in both Twitter followers and Facebook friends is crushing the Republican challenger field. While GOP candidates continue to be baited into a false sense of media security through weekly visits to Face the Nation, Meet the Press & Fox News, the campaign online has ramped into high gear. Based on what I continue to see each week, there is no chance that anyone is going to catch Barack Obama online. The Republican Party and its leadership continue to tease folks like me saying that they have a plan and wait and see. Based on what I have observed online, the only surprise that awaits this fall will be how large a win the President will achieve. Those that have read this column and commented along the way can be portioned into several groups. There are some that take this data and analysis and discount it as not being relevant to the election. They argue that the online audience doesnt represent the true American. Still others worry like I do that the leadership within the Republican Party is tragically out of step with the insight and expertise required to leverage the modern day interactive tool kit. Regardless of what camp you belong to, it should be crystal clear to both camps that there is a problem. A big problem. Washington Post: Women Set Rick Perrys Facebook Page on Fire http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/post/women-set-rick-perrys-facebook-page-onfire/2012/03/19/gIQALJgIPS_blog.html?tid=pm_pop Lori Stahl March 20, 2012

DALLAS Its no secret that Gov. Rick Perry never stopped campaigning against President Obama, even after high-tailing it back to Texas after a less-than-stellar presidential run. The governors been dishing it out on voter ID and abortion while surrounded by mostly like-minded folk in the red state Texas. Until this week, that is. Now Perrys Facebook page is drawing thousands of comments pointedly taking him to task for cutting off federal funds for womens health programs because some clinics are operated by Planned Parenthood. Many of the comments are from women facetiously seeking advice on their menstrual periods, since hes styled himself as an expert on womens health. I would like your opinion since I cant make medical decisions myself being a woman and all, one woman wrote on Perrys Facebook wall. Since you know so much about my healthcare, I was wondering if you could tell me how to handle my period since it is very heavy 4 days out of every month. What is the best product so I can have a productive day during these times or do you think I should just stay at home and call in sick or better yet quite my job since I cant make my own decisions maybe I shouldnt be working. What is your medical position on this issue? The mocking comments signal considerable frustration over the Perrys highly visible role in cutting off federal Medicaid money for the Texas Womens Health Program. Although Texas has previously accepted $31 million per year in federal funds for the program, Perry and state Republican lawmakers said they can no longer abide that money flowing through Planned Parenthood clinics in Texas, even though participating clinics dont provide abortions. The battle over the Texas Womens Health program, which provides cancer screenings, pap smears, hormone patches, birth control and other basic services to more than 130,000 low-income women, has played out like a gunfight in a spaghetti western. State officials warned that they would stop accepting money from the federal government unless they could cut off funding for Planned Parenthood clinics. Federal officials warned that selectively cutting out certain clinics would jeopardize funding. Texas did it anyway. The federal government halted the money. Perry said Texas would pick up the slack so services will continue, but he didnt say how, particularly as the state faces another looming budget crisis. And on Friday, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott sued the federal government over the issue, with Perrys blessing. This is about life and the rule of law, which Texas respects and the Obama Administration does not, Perry said in a statement last week. Previously, Perry has said the federal government is intruding on the states rights, sounding very much like Perry the presidential candidate.

It is the height of political posturing for the Obama Administration to put the interests of abortion providers and their affiliates, like Planned Parenthood, over the well-being of more than 100,000 low-income Texas women, Perry said in a statement last week. As of Monday afternoon, more than 4,000 comments were posted on Perrys Facebook wall. The backlash, such as it is, is expected to continue Tuesday, as protesters take to the streets outside the Capitol in Austin for the third week in a row. Clad in red clothes, the protestors have said theyre seeing red over the fate of the womens health program. All Facebook: How Mitt Romney Upgraded to Timeline http://allfacebook.com/facebook-timeline-romney_b82028 Jennifer Moire March 15, 2012 Romney was technically the second of the Republican candidates to create a timeline page, although the one that Newt Gingrich launched was on a separate page focused on attacking the opposition. Moffatt said: Timeline is going to be really interesting because it will move the conversation to a far more visual interaction and emphasize the positives of the campaign. The app boxes and ability to pin posts and highlight stories will really make our Facebook page more dynamic and engaging. While candidate Barack Obamas Facebook timeline launched shortly after the layout was introduced, the rigors of a presidential primary race means timeline has been slow to appear on the Republican candidates pages. (Gingrichs profile adopted the new feature earlier this month, while his official page has not, even though the former Speaker of the House created a separate page with a timeline that attacks Romney.) Moffatt described the campaigns approach to incorporating timeline on Romneys page: It takes a while to figure out how all pieces come together. We built third party apps into Facebook and had to determine where they work within the new real estate. There were strategic challenges but timeline is overall a net positive. The ability to see our changes for a day before they went live was good. The governor isnt going to create any response to the attack on him by Gingrichs Romney Record page, as Moffatt explained: Politics is different than the corporate world, where there is a tendency to treat all brands positive. Governor Romneys campaign is embracing what social media should be, which is not one-off pages. The brief delay in seeing a timeline upgrade on the governors Facebook page was, Moffatt says, a reflection of how busy the campaign is during the primary fight, along with the resources at this stage: Changing to timeline required a determinative approach with staff. We took an inventory of the posts and graphics in the old format, but we didnt want to start something and then leave it in the cross hairs. Our goal was to build a timeline that was best for Mitt Romney.

Moffatt sees the campaigns new Spotify playlist and Ann Romneys Pinterest boards as a natural progression of Romneys Facebook page: We are always looking for those components, and understand that apps definitely feed into Facebooks massive audience. As a campaign we ask ourselves where each tactic falls based on what we want to achieve on the campaign. [Obama] is already in a general election mindset and is building out these Facebook components. We are going state by state and have to allocate our resources accordingly. Some things dont make sense given where the campaign is. Moffatt is confident that Romneys campaign can go toe-to-toe with the presidents re-election team on Facebook and social media in general, if the former governor becomes the nominee. In the coming weeks, look for the Romney campaign to introduce new features on its Facebook page as it pivots to more user generated content and introduce more opportunities for people to engage, participate and share content. We just have to make sure we dont start a conversation that we cant finish. We dont want to talk to people but with people. We never want to launch a feature and then have it not continue. We asked Moffatt if he was concerned with the campaigns Facebook engagement figures, which some studies show lag behind other Republican contenders with far fewer followers. There are a lot of other metrics that define success. My only concern is to be cognizant of what people are saying on Facebook. We have the most engaged groups, and we saw high engagement figures with our recent Birthday Note to Mitt,which literally resulted in tens of thousands of fans signing the card. The rest are just gotcha numbers. We know who we are engaging with, we monitor feedback and on any given day have 30-plus posts and thats good engagement to me. We asked Moffatt what makes a good Facebook page administrator on a political campaign, and he replied: Someone who has worked on a campaign. The goal is not to have the smartest Facebook strategy but one that supplements the offline strategies of a campaign. Look at ballot initiatives. Whats the point of having fans and then cant motivate those people to act. Facebook is only as good as the actions you drive them to. Finally, we asked if Moffatt if he had any Facebook advice for other political campaigns, large or small. He said: Facebook is the great equalizer. Campaigns dont have to have a fully developed app system to leverage Facebook. You need authentic content and a system to get messages out. Campaigns need strong engaging content more than anything else. Facebook is also a way for us to test messages for online advertising and other platforms, because its instant feedback that we can incorporate into search advertising. The platform is a great leading indicator. Tech President: Yes They Can: What Voters Have Lost and Campaigns Have Gained from 2008 to 2012 http://techpresident.com/news/21902/yes-they-can-what-voters-have-lost-and-campaigns-have-gained-

2008-2012 Micah L. Sifry March 13, 2012 Here are my slides and a "pencast" mashup of the audio and my real-time hand-written notes on the panel I did Sunday March 11 at SXSW along with Teddy Goff, Obama 2012 digital director; Zeynep Tufekci of the University of North Carolina; Claudia Milne, the BBC.com online's North American editor; and Michael Scherer of Time magazine, who was our moderator. Our topic was "Election 2012: Campaigns, Coverage & the Internet," but Tufekci and I both tried hard to shift the conversation away from easy patter about the presidential campaigns are making smart use of social media, and onto the harder question of who is actually being empowered by all the new and more sophisticated uses of technology that we're seeing (or that are still hidden from us) in campaign 2012. I had three points I wanted to get across. First, too much of the mainstream political media coverage of tech's role in the campaign falls for the digital candy: the fact that Romney has a Spotify playlist, that his wife Ann as a Pinterest, that Obama has an Instagram account, or that they're both using Square to process mobile donations--these stories are great marketing opportunities for all these companies and platforms, but they are mostly a distraction. Second, compared to 2004 or 2008, in 2012 the relative balance of power between campaigns and voters--in terms of how they use interactive communications technologies to influence the course of the election, has subtly but substantially shifted back toward the campaigns. I illustrated this point by showing the audience how in 2008, My.BarackObama.com (MyBO), the campaign's innovative social networking platform, gave supporters the ability not just to create local events and fundraise, but to also form groups, affiliate with friends and even blog. Those features have all been quietly deprecated by the Obama campaign (despite Chris Hughes' promise back in the heady days right after the November election that "The online tools in My.BarackObama will live on"), and while Goff says they're coming back when the campaign rolls out its redesigned version of MyBO, we're already more than halfway through the election and those features had enabled Obama supporters to do a lot of self-organizing back in 2007-08. Third, both the Obama and Romney campaigns are deeply and quietly invested in plugging into their supporters' social networks, a process I called "Facebookization." Unlike four years ago, when we saw a flowering of user-generated Facebook groups (led by the "Million Strong for Obama"), here the game is all about the campaigns' ability to access their supporters' social graph, mine them for insights and then presumably make sophisticated and targeted use of word-of-mouth networks. In other words, it's not about broadly segmented advertising, which has gone on for decades (you subscribe to Guns and Ammo Magazine, we'll send you a pro-guns mailer). It's about figuring out which of your friends can most effectively convince you to vote for the candidate, or what kinds of signals and messages may be the most effective triggers for your support. Thus both the Obama and Romney campaigns try very hard to get people to sign up on their websites using Facebook, which automatically enrolls them in the campaign's Facebook apps. This connection is far stronger than a mere "like." As you'll find if you dig deep into your Facebook privacy settings, both the Obama and Romney apps can not only access your basic info, including name, picture, gender, birthday, religious and political views, they can also post status messages, notes, photos and videos on your behalf and access your data when you're not using the app. Facebook used to prevent third-party apps from keeping any of that data, but that rule has been dropped. I think of this whole process--of tapping a supporter's social graph and

then analyzing the larger data ecosystem that results to aid the campaign's messaging, fundraising and organizing efforts--as Facebookization, and to be clear, it includes more than just the Facebook data, it includes all the data exhaust that people share about themselves that the campaigns are trying to vacuum up. This isn't something ordinary people can do--unless you know not only how to code apps but also how to spots patterns in the resulting data. Zeynep Tufekci agreed, noting that "campaigns have discovered that data mining can help them get people to do what they want," pointing to a recent New York Times Magazine story about Target subtly shifting its marketing messages when it discovers that a potential customer is probably pregnant and interested in (or vulnerable to) ads for different products. She decried the "black box" of campaign secrecy around these practices, but then made a larger point, drawing on her study of the Arab Spring uprisings. New technologies, she said, tend to be adopted first by outsiders who use them to disrupt the status quo, but with time power learns to master these new tools. As you'll hear if you listen to the discussion, Teddy Goff strongly disagreed with this analysis. He argues that in today's environment, the user "has an incredible amount of power to do us harm or do us right," and thus campaigns have to focus on being "real, authentic, local and personal." He also accused me of being too focused on the changes in MyBO and argued that "There's a gigantic difference that has occurred between 2008 and now: we don't have a need to build a social network and we are not." He cited the Obama campaign's efforts on Tumblr, where they have worked hard to show that they get whimsical Tumblr culture, and pointed out that the best response that they've gotten on a volunteer ask was on Tumblr because "people see that we get it." Goff insisted that Obama supporters were more empowered, not less, in 2012, and said that the President personally "really believes in giving ordinary people a seat at the table"--citing the current fundraising effort they have underway now that will include a $3 donor among four random Obama donors who will share a meal with the President. To some laughter from the audience, he exclaimed, "Don't you guys think the Internet brings out the best in people?" The idea that it might be used to manipulate voters was apparently not thinkable to him. I have to give Goff credit for showing up and representing the Obama campaign; it's quite smart of them to have a big presence at SXSW, given the tech-heavy scene. Unfortunately, we only had an hour, and thus didn't have enough time to discuss what might be different about how the Obama political operation might work post-election, assuming the President is re-elected. "All of us have learned some lessons from postelection 2008 and 09-10," Goff said, " and hopefully our supporters have too." We shall see. POLITICO: SXSW: Techies Look to Redo Campaigns http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/73868.html Kim Hart March 11, 2012 AUSTIN, Texas Bolstered by the effect Internet activists have had, from upending piracy legislation in Congress to toppling governments in the Middle East, tech junkies and social media mavens spent the weekend comparing ideas that could upset American campaigns and politics.

From crowdsourcing a third-party presidential candidate to serving as the eHarmony for elections by matching unattached voters to like-minded candidates, campaign fever has taken hold of some corners of the tech Olympics at South by Southwest. Were reimagining the entire way the primary process is done, and its opening up opportunities for new leaders, said Kahlil Byrd, CEO of Americans Elect, a nonprofit thats trying to field a third-party candidate through crowdsourcing on the Internet. Americans Elect had taken over a lounge in the convention center and had a costumed elephant and donkey wandering around, taking swings at each other. By going to its website, voters can nominate people they would like to see on the ticket alongside the Republican and Democratic candidates, and the nomination process culminates with an online convention in June. The candidate will then have to choose a vicepresidential running mate from the other party. Technology has become a huge player in all electoral politics, but its really only been used as a vehicle to raise money or to help organize people incrementally to get them to the polls, Byrd said. High-profile election-year politics coupled with the affect of Internet activists have led to a bigger political focus at this lively conference, where techies and investors are typically more excited about the next hot Web startup than about the electoral process. Established companies, like Google, Facebook and Twitter, attended in full force throwing parties, speaking on panels and, in Googles case, turning a block of grungy dive bars into a brightly colored, futuristic village. Big media companies CNN, The New York Times and PBS gleaned insights on how the Web is changing the means by which viewers get and share political news. Campaign consultants attended to talk about how voter data gathered by social networks and online behavior are helping candidates target messages to specific demographics. The technology is getting more sophisticated and is using data more effectively, said Patrick Ruffini, president of Engage, a political consulting firm. If you want to target just Republicans on Facebook, you can do that. With targeted online advertising, you can get a lot more reach. As social platforms build up, they become ad platforms for politicians, he said. Thats driving a crop of new startups to try to get involved in the process. Likester, a five-person company in Seattle, was at the conference to pitch itself as a way to let candidates find like-minded voters. The application makes recommendations based on what users post on their Facebook profiles. CEO Kevin McCarthy wants to put a political twist on that by showing campaigns their supporters are also likely to be, for example, soccer moms or churchgoers, so they can be targeted with campaign ads. Washington gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna is using the app, said McCarthy. Other startups focus on educating voters about the candidates rather than trying to help candidates get to voters. Keya Dannenbaum, CEO of Philadelphia-based ElectNext, calls her company an eHarmony for elections. Voters take a survey that helps them find candidates with similar values. Some of these startups, like Americans Elect, are not starving, either. Byrd said Americans Elect has a 2012 budget of $40 million, raised through individual donations. Its a finalist for an award in SXSWs experimental category, a crucial milestone, Byrd said.

SXSW was important for us because its an acknowledgment that in the political space where technology doesnt interact very much people are really starting to think about technology, he said. Votizen, a Silicon Valley firm that gives voters tools to campaign for candidates they like, says that its 20,000 users have made contact with about 600,000 voters. Sean Parker, an early Facebook investor, recently invested in Votizen and is expected to talk about the company during an event with former Vice President Al Gore on Monday. Social medias role in get-out-the-vote campaigns is one of the more obvious uses of sites like Facebook and Twitter, especially in trying to reach people who arent very interested in politics in the first place. How do you make voting cool when politics is a dirty word? asked Heather Smith, president of Rock the Vote. Social media can excite people and make them feel more powerful in the political process. The average Facebook user has 130 friends, and campaigns are figuring out how to leverage those influential relationships with the theory that people are more likely to pay attention to a campaign ad or a news story if it comes from a friend. Theyre creating apps that let online supporters share on their Facebook timelines that theyve called friends on a candidates behalf, donated money or voted. Were moving away from the wisdom of the crowd and really moving toward the wisdom of friends, said Katie Harbath, Facebook associate manager for policy who works directly with Republican candidates. As Election Day nears, campaigns can ask supporters to ask friends in other parts of the country to get involved. Its not going to be just, Share this with your friends, Harbath said. Its going to be, Share this with your friends in this crucial swing district. But for all the hype around social media in politics, its far from a panacea, said Zeynep Tufekci, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For one thing, the micro-targeting of ads allows different segments of voters to see different sides of a candidate, which could actually be harmful to accountability. The level of targeting is just phenomenal, she said. Now we have full psychological profiles of people, and its going to get worse in the next few years. Candidates are also harnessing the cool applications that are decidedly nonpolitical to help humanize their image or find common ground with voters, Harbath said. For example, she said Facebook is seeing more candidates sharing their Spotify playlists, Pinterest finds or favorite TV shows on Hulu. Mitt Romney posted an endearing photograph of him with his father, and President Barack Obama once posted about making his last student loan payment. Social networks are sometimes considered mini echo chambers, meaning that people with similar political affiliations tend to stick together and interact online only with other like-minded people. For that reason, social media havent always been seen as an effective way to convert undecided voters. But new research shows that social media users may be surprised to learn the political leanings of their friends. About 38 percent of social network users have discovered through friends posts that their political beliefs are not what they had thought they were, according to research from the Pew Research Centers Internet & American Life Project to be released Monday.

As online social networks grow, so does the potential for more conversation and disagreement between people over political issues, said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew project, who is presenting the research at SXSW on Monday morning. News stories shared on Twitter or political messages posted by a friend on Facebook have persuasive power. People dont separate out what influences them, he said. Its a big mush ball of conversation but its the conversation that matters most. CNN: Gingrich Pins Hopes on Hashtags http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/10/politics/gingrich-social-media/index.html Shawna Shepard March 11, 2012 Dothan, Alabama (CNN) -- Newt Gingrich may occasionally refer to a Twitter hash tag as a hash mark but he is relying on the Internet to reach out to voters, one tweet and Facebook friend at a time. The Republican presidential candidate doesn't have as much money to spend on television advertising as his counterparts, but Gingrich is devoting considerable resources to maximize his online presence. Gingrich, who often boasts that 95% of his donations are less than $250, announced at a campaign stop in Alabama that he just received his 175,000th donation. The former House speaker has been able to stay in the race thanks to his online fundraising efforts. "This is part of how we've survived against Romney, frankly. He raises lots of money off Wall Street and we reach out through the Internet, so we can run a very inexpensive campaign," Gingrich said in Savannah, Georgia, on March 2. Gingrich spokesman R.C. Hammond said the campaign has raised a little more than $10 million in online fundraising, and approximately a quarter of that has been spent on digital strategy, which includes fundraising, advertising, the campaign website and social media management. In late January they hired digital media consultant Vincent Harris to help the burgeoning campaign after Gingrich won the South Carolina primary. "I stepped in to a campaign that was very well-versed with everything online, they just didn't have the people resources," said Harris, who worked for Rick Perry's campaign before the Texas governor dropped out of the race. According to Harris, he primarily helped redesign Gingrich's website and brought online advertising and Facebook expertise to the campaign. He said he and his firm Harris Media "were able to articulate more about the potential ROIs (returns on investment) for running online ads." Four weeks ago Gingrich introduced his plan to reduce gasoline prices to $2.50 per gallon and the campaign has aggressively promoted it on social media sites. On Twitter, the hash tag #$250gas has been tweeted 35,105 times by more than 7,400 users, according to Harris. Gingrich incites chuckles from the younger members of audiences when he tries to explain his campaign's social media efforts.

"On Twitter if you go to hashtag $250gas and just put that in, that's a whole new group that we're building around so we can Twitter and we can send out tweets," Gingrich said in Tupelo, Mississippi. "For those of you who don't know about Twitter, you send out tweets to 'tweeples' so everybody who's on Twitter is a tweeple." He may be trying to inject a little humor when he flubs online jargon, but he often marvels at the connective power of social media networks. Facebook has become the best way to reach average voters -- for free, as Gingrich likes to point out -- with as many as 141 million users who are 18 and over, which represents roughly 60% of the population. When Gingrich asks people at rallies to mention his $2.50 gallon gas plan, he says, "There are enough people here (that) I bet you reach at least a quarter-million or half-million people just by putting it on your Facebook page." That might be a slight exaggeration, depending on crowd size, but according to Harris the average Facebook user has 130 friends, and if one of those friends clicks the "like" button or makes a comment, that post could potentially reach another hundred or so users. With campaigns scheduling rallies with sometimes less than 48 hours' notice, reaching voters through social media is the best option. They're able to post information about an event to different networks, known as micro-targeting, and they can run inexpensive geo-targeted ads, based on a user's location, to help push people out to events in their area. And the campaign is applying lessons learned in this week's contest in Georgia to next week's in Alabama and Mississippi. "Since we did so well with evangelicals in Georgia, we are going to be advertising to folks in Christian colleges and folks who have graduated from Christian colleges in Mississippi and Alabama," Harris said. Twitter users make up a much smaller percentage of Americans, fewer than 10%, but when it comes to fundraising, a campaign can bring in the same amount of money raised through Facebook. Harris said that's because the Twitter audience includes "hyperactive" users like political junkies, and people involved in politics like local party activists that are "hyper-engaged."

TechCrunch: Social Super Tuesday How the 2012 Candidates Stacked Up on Facebook http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/11/social-super-tuesday/ Roger Katz March 11, 2012 Every vote counted on Super Tuesday. The results coming down to the wire, with Mitt Romney narrowly beating Rick Santorum by only 0.8% in the Ohio primary. While some may argue that the issues elevated Mitt above the rest, as a social marketer I cant help to wonder if social savvy determined the winners and losers. Are 2012 Politicians Social Leaders?

Both marketers and politicians alike know that inspiring and motivating fans/supporters to share your story is an incredibly powerful influence. Once someone has decided to support a candidate, does the candidate encourage them to share that choice with friends? Do they make it easy? Do they make fans break a sweat? I decided to take a quick look this week focused for comparisons sake limited myself to Facebook and summarized my observations below. Barack Obama: 25.4M fans Obamas 2012 Are You In? campaign (recently expired) simply asked fans to share their statement of support with their network, and invite their network to join. It included a leaderboard-style gamification mechanic that rewarded fans by telling them how many people were inspired to join the Obama campaign as a result of their wall post. Obamas team chose a nice man of the people cover photo, fist bumping a blue-collar worker, and a Pinned post that when I looked had 75K likes, 21K shares (more than the likes, which is a very high number) and 25K comments (almost of the likes!) since it was posted less than two weeks ago (February 26th). The Obama team did an exemplary job telling his life story through milestones from his infamous birth certificate printed on a mug to his first job at Baskin-Robbins, when he met Michelle, and more. Key Learning: His Im In campaign was simple. It did not request the fan to do much of anything other than what they already do on Facebook typing, and clicking Share. No friction, no fuss. The Obama Facebook experience is comprehensive, professional, and authentically irreverent, with lots of content that is easy to share with fans. Mitt Romney: 1.4M fans The cover photo includes a bold photo of Mitt Romney and his wife, surrounded by supporters. His Pinned post includes Super Tuesday photos, with engagement at 106 shares, 2.7K likes, and 1.5K comments when I last checked. His main Facebook app, Stand with Mitt, really puts fans to work and requires a significant time investment to complete the actions. Here, supporters are asked to download a PDF, print it (preferably in color), write on it, take a photo, upload the photo, enter their email address, and send the photo to the Romney team for possible inclusion in a photo gallery on Facebook. The oddly named Whats your take? app is slightly more socially savvy, asking followers to answer the question Have you ever volunteered for a campaign? While its unlikely anyone would want to share any answer other than Yes, Loved it, it is a good effort. Some of the options in the app dont appear to work, but the comments are interesting. And its good to see the campaign managers have let negative comments stand. Key Learning: The ask in the Stand with Mitt app has significant barriers to participation. Though the resulting photos are fun, engaging and provide an interesting look into the face of a Romney supporter, the Romney team should have made the whole process considerably easier and simpler. This campaign feels a lot like one that would have been popular in the early 2000s, and featured on a campaign microsite. It just doesnt feel like an activity tuned for Facebook users. Youd have to be a pretty fervent supporter to go to the trouble of doing this.

Ron Paul: 898K fans Given that Ron Paul supporters are generally thought to be in the 18-39 age group, its surprising that his Facebook presence isnt more sophisticated. The Ron Paul Facebook Promoter offers a confusing and poorly designed campaign that requests a name, email and phone number, and also asks fans to change their profile picture to show their support for the candidate. The campaign selects a photo for you, and provides instructions on how to download that photo, and then tells you how to change your profile to the Ron Paul sanctioned photo. Paul seems to have devoted more of his resources to his websites, which are complete and highly comprehensive. (His Choose Your State app on www.ronpaul2012.com has 608K shares, 62.5K tweets, and >750K shares by other means.) Key Learning: While the effect of seeing Ron Pauls brand on every one of a fans Facebook posts would be a good brand coup, most savvy Facebook fans would not only already be aware how to change their Facebook profile photo, but probably would also want to add their own personal spin to something as critical as that photo. But while Paul hasnt fully embraced Facebook, he does appear to have made more effort to embrace social sharing on his website. Newt Gingrich: 293K fans Newt Gingrichs Facebook page is focused less on putting his small number of fans to work, and more on soliciting money for his campaign. His Donate page, Sign Newts Energy Petition, and intriguingly named Newt Live Cam, all send fans off Facebook to his www.newt.org site. There are various petitions to sign, and in the past week, the Gingrich team added a States with Newt app that lets fans visit pages such as Delaware with Newt to drive local community action. As this app indicates the number of fans in each state in the case of Delaware 67, with the largest being Florida, with 2,584 fans it points more to the lack of following, than a healthy grass roots movement. Key Learning: Little effort is put into encouraging fans to share their support of Gingrich on Facebook with friends and family. Asking for name, email, and location before spinning the fan off to www.newt.org, indicates little understanding of the potential social power of Facebook. Gingrich would have been more authentic to himself by engaging fans in sharing his views on Facebook, rather than using the space to primarily ask for donations. Facebook users value authenticity, and conversational debate, and tend to avoid places where they dont see those traits. Rick Santorum: 160K fans Rick Santorums Facebook page is full of things to do, though most are not on Facebook. The first link provided takes you to a Fundly page conveniently pre-populated with your Facebook credentials. Other links take you to ricksantorum.com. The Santorum team has, however, provided a tempting like-gate where fans are rewarded with a free e-book of something called Santorisms essential quotes and images of Rick Santorum in a PDF file. Key Learning: The Santorum team did provide exclusive content behind a like-gate a decent social marketing convention but wasted the opportunity. They should have taken that PDF e-book content and made each and every quote and photo shareable by fans. That would have made a perfect, viral social content-sharing campaign and would play to the reasons that fans love their candidate, and gives them something to share that tells their friends why they love that candidate. This November the Winning Candidate Will Keep it Simple, Yet Engaging

Successful social campaigns are actually quite simple. Make fans/supporters work, but dont make them work too hard. The most engaging campaigns have an interaction thats clean, simple, fun, and rewarding with as little friction between click and share as possible. Respect the social context and dont send the fans to your website. Keep the fan where they want to be on the social network where they encountered the campaign and give them something to share. Content speaks volumes, and political candidates do have a lot of, ahem, content to share. Social media represents a huge potential to engage followers both locally and nationally. Social media lets fans volunteer without even leaving their seats. Politicians must learn how to put advocates to work on their campaigns and make it easy and fun. Chances are the candidate that masters engagement and grassroots community-building will find themselves in the White House after Novembers election. Atlanta Journal Constitution: Gingrich Engages His Tweeples on Social Media http://www.ajc.com/news/news/local-govt-politics/gingrich-engages-his-tweeples-on-social-media/nQR5x/ Daniel Malloy March 10, 2012 BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- Newt Gingrich is amused at the notion of tweeples and for a while was saying hash mark instead of the correct hash tag to talk about a Twitter tool. But the 68-year-old candidate has developed a robust social media operation that experts say is in many ways savvier than his Republican presidential rivals in amplifying his message and engaging the public. Look no further than his pledge that gas will return to $2.50 a gallon if he is elected. The campaign started a #250gas Twitter hashtag in recent weeks to condense and distribute the message, and it has been tweeted 35,105 times reaching as many as 7 million Twitter users, the campaign said. Perhaps the biggest sign of its influence is the fact that President Barack Obamas re-election campaign the Internet politicking standard-bearer -- purchased advertising space so if you search for #250gas, you see a tweet from Obama linking to his energy policy. Gingrich has settled on gas prices, and a claim that increased domestic drilling will stem their rapid rise, in order to resuscitate his lagging campaign. Without much money to spend on pricey television advertising, the Internet is a cheap way to spread the news and when Gingrich fans do it on social media, its free. Gingrich closes every speech with a social media-based appeal, telling crowds to write Newt = $2.50 gas on their Facebook pages and use the Twitter hashtag. In Pell City, Ala., on Wednesday he added an request to take photos of his $2.50 gas rally signs with the sharable application Instagram. Thats something I actually dont do, but my wife has told me I should, Gingrich said. A woman came up to me in Montgomery and told me she used Instagram. Im trying to learn all these new things. Its fitting for a candidate who broke ground by officially announcing his presidential candidacy on Twitter in May. He now inhabits everything from Pinterest to Google Plus. Theres all of these niche social networks, and Newt, hes very good in that he jumps on every social network there is, said Patrick Ruffini, the president of media firm EngageDC who also has worked on Republican campaigns. Thats good. That shows theyre diligent.

The platform Gingrich spends the most time and money on is social media behemoth Facebook, where you can even reach your 70-year-old tea party grandma, said Gingrich campaign social media consultant Vincent Harris. Harris worked for Rick Perrys campaign until the Texas governor bowed out of the race in January and Gingrich snagged his services. While Perry was familiar with the tools and even tweeted himself, which Gingrich typically does not do I wouldnt say the web is as much of a critical central piece of the campaign as it was on the Gingrich campaign, Harris said. Gingrich was the first candidate to upgrade to a timeline page on Facebook, then he launched a timeline to attack rival Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor basically an opposition research file, sorted by year. Because Facebook users willingly share so much information, it allows incredibly precise communication. Harris said the campaign this week is advertising on Facebook ahead of Tuesdays critical Alabama and Mississippi primaries targeting graduates of Christian colleges in those two states. Other tools include the ability for Gingrich supporters to make phone calls to voters through Facebook, and broadcast how many calls they have made to encourage competition. That particular feature prompted the Facebook political team to single out Gingrichs operation. In a December blog post company officials wrote: Gingrichs Facebook page is a great example of providing many ways for supporters to get involved. But the Gingrich campaign and all the Republicans in the field are only beginning to scratch the surface. Newt Gingrich, he is pretty good -- or he seems to be pretty good -- at reactive uses of social media rather than proactive uses of social media, said Heather LaMarre, a University of Minnesota professor who researches candidates use of social media tools. If something comes up in the press or comes out in a debate, hes pretty good at using social media to get the drumbeat going and raise attention about an issue. None of them have shown great strategy at launching initiatives and getting people excited about things ahead of time in social media. Republicans also have yet to tap into the get-out-the-vote tools the Democrats have, Ruffini said. I dont think were quite where the Obama campaign is socially, he said. Obviously theyve got good numbers, but thats not the full story. They are very intently focused on data, data mining, capturing data from all these different platforms and transforming it to better targeting. I dont think Republican candidates are anywhere near close to that. Harris insists that Gingrich and other Republicans are matching Team Obama online, and noted the campaign employs technology that gathers all the social media chatter around big events like debates and puts it into visual form for easy study. Despite all the new tools and ways to engage, LaMarre said social media has not yet transformed the 2012 campaign, and Gingrich is a prime example.

The two comebacks he has had, they werent from something he did on social media it was more to do with the traditional campaign, she said, referring to televised debates. Its amplification effect, the ability to amplify a message quickly. Until people learn how to make it more proactive, how to use it to launch campaigns and get it going rather than discuss what actually happened, until they do that, its not going to be all that mind blowing of a radical change in the way we elect people. USA Today: Can Social Media Predict Election Outcomes? http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-03-05/social-super-tuesday-prediction/53374536/1 Scott Martin and Jon Swartz March 6, 2012 SAN FRANCISCO Contenders for the Republican presidential nomination will put social media to the test Tuesday. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is poised to win big during Super Tuesday, according to one firm's analysis of Twitter trends. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are key battlegrounds for the campaigns of Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul. As people interact with campaigns on these popular Web destinations, the pile of social data on voters and candidates grows. That treasure trove of information has helped campaigns target their messages to voters and allowed technology companies to analyze social-media trends and make some predictions about Super Tuesday's winners. "When you have big data in real time that streams, it gives you the ability to predict this," says IDC analyst Mike Fauscette. Super Tuesday is election day for 10 states Alaska, Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia. Voters casting ballots in those GOP primaries could determine the Republican presidential nominee. How Attensity did its analysis Attensity conducted a study of social-networking site Twitter to forecast voting outcomes for Republican candidates ahead of todays Super Tuesday elections in 10 states. The social-analytics company, which is based in Palo Alto, Calif., drew its results from more than 800,000 tweets Feb. 25 through March 2. According to Attensitys analysis, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney will be the top vote getter in seven states, with each of the other contenders taking one state each. This is what Twitter is telling us, says Rebecca MacDonald, Attensitys vice president of marketing. Whether or not this is true remains to be seen. Attensity connected messages with positive sentiment to the overall share of voice, or volume of tweets, for each candidate to arrive at its results.

But forecasting election results based on Twitter, Facebook or other social-media sources is still in its infancy, and skeptics abound. If they come close "I would argue it's coincidental," says Forrester analyst Zach Hofer-Shall. "There are a number of problems with it." "It's a fascinating area of research, but it's not yet mature," says Noah Smith, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science. Attensity, Netvibes, Lithium and others provide software that allows customers to do market research based on online data. Much of this work is based on text analysis that taps into decades of linguistics research. Using such analytics, AT&T could measure whether customers were venting on Twitter about bad service, for example, and act to reduce customer defections. Political campaigns can be analyzed in similar fashion. Romney will be the top vote-getter in seven states Massachusetts, Virginia, Idaho, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee and North Dakota on Super Tuesday, according to an analysis of Twitter that Attensity conducted for USA TODAY. Georgia will go to Gingrich, Alaska to Ron Paul and Vermont to Santorum, according to the analytics firm. "Whether or not this is true remains to be seen," says Rebecca MacDonald, Attensity's vice president of marketing. "This is what Twitter is telling us." The research drew from more than 800,000 tweets on Twitter from the past week. The social analysis measured positive sentiment and the share of voice for each candidate. To be sure, forecasting from social media raises doubts. All the Twitter buzz around Paul, for example, could easily be misinterpreted as a winning outcome. Twitter is "not perfectly projectable to the whole overall population," says Hofer-Shall. Also, Twitter is something of a marketer's paradise, with influence easily gamed. "You can hire people to tweet for you and you can have it (Twitter) robo-tweet," says Bernardo Huberman, director of the social computing lab at Hewlett-Packard. Gallup reported that Romney has a 16-point lead in the national race. Social-media analysis "is a very interesting area," says Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport. "We're exploring it ourselves." Social strategies The campaigns of Romney, Santorum, Gingrich and Paul have all embraced social networking. The reasons are simple: Facebook is where people hang out; YouTube is where they watch videos; and Twitter is the spot for water-cooler banter. "From an advertising perspective, Facebook is the flavor of the day for every political strategist," says John Durham, professor of advertising and marketing at the University of San Francisco. "They realize people are no longer in a passive media source such as television." Romney has the edge at Facebook. His Facebook page has nearly 1.5 million "likes," and he scores well on another measure: "people talking about this," which refers to unique page views over a seven-day period.

The former Massachusetts governor racked up more than 80,000 "talking about this" points. It's a key barometer of user engagement and is closely watched, says Jan Rezab, CEO of website Socialbakers. Socialbakers analyzes how marketers can reach targeted consumers on Facebook and Twitter, and interact with them. It has measured the engagement of followers of President Obama and the Republican candidates. "The targeting capabilities that Facebook provides are really phenomenal," says online-ad adviser Rich LeFurgy, formerly chairman of the Internet Advertising Bureau. "If you don't have a campaign around social, you're really going to be hurt." Zac Moffatt, digital director of the Romney campaign, says they are using every advertising option available from Facebook. The social network's self-serve advertising platform makes it easy for campaigns to build Facebook ads that target a specific gender, age group, city and interests, such as political parties. Once the specific categories are selected, the service spits back a "cost per click" for every time somebody clicks on that advertisement. "Facebook helps you find your most engaged members of the community," says Moffatt. That's even been the case outside of the U.S. Ciarn McMahon, a psychology lecturer at the Dublin Business School, conducted a study last year that found candidates' Facebook popularity had an influence on Ireland's elections. "The Facebook fans are going to be a reasonably good predictor on Super Tuesday," McMahon says. "I would be happier to be in Romney's place in those numbers." Republican candidates are using everything from live streams and photos to status updates to engage voters and draw them into their campaigns. The end game: find supporters who contribute money and recruit others to the cause. Debate winners usually push ahead of the pack in social media. The engagement, and buzz factor, for candidates surges after wins and debates, says Rezab. After Santorum picked up three wins in one night in February, his Facebook page gained 9,000 fans. Gingrich's numbers climbed after his win in South Carolina in January. Romney gained traction among users after his debate performance in Florida. The opposite occurs, too, when candidates underperform. Although Romney has about five times more "likes" than Gingrich, they are relatively close on "people talking about this," Rezab says. "The other category measures how people share data with others and evangelize." Social interaction on Facebook is valuable to campaigns in two ways, says Katie Harbath, who works with the GOP on behalf of Facebook. It gives consumers a peek into a candidate's personality, but it also drives traffic to the candidate's website and other online properties containing donation information and volunteer signups. Gingrich uses an online phone-bank tool on his new site, Newt.org, to encourage donations and redirect users to the Facebook page of the former speaker of the House.

Santorum's campaign has used Facebook to mobilize the former senator's following. "It's been great for activating them and getting them to events and grass-roots initiatives," says digital strategist Becky Mancuso of political advertising agency BrabenderCox, which handles Santorum's social campaign. Twitter polling Social media is just the latest technology that presidential candidates have embraced to spin their message and build support. President Franklin D. Roosevelt mastered radio. President John F. Kennedy and President Richard Nixon used television. President Obama brought social media to the spotlight in his 2008 presidential victory, establishing Facebook's and Twitter's status in politics. Twitter provides real-time feedback on debates that's much faster than traditional polling. Campaigns are paying close attention. That's because such chatter can gauge how a candidate's message is being received or even warn of a popularity dive. Campaigns that closely monitor the Twittersphere have a better feel of voter sentiment. That allows candidates to fine-tune their message for a particular state. "You could play to your audience," says IDC's Fauscette. Twitter's promoted-tweets advertising has also become an important tool. "Most of the candidates that are running ads on Twitter are bidding on key words around the debates," says Adam Sharp, who manages government and politics for Twitter. Jennifer Steen, an assistant professor of political science at Arizona State University, says today's digital strategies mirror age-old tactics. Gathering data and targeting Internet ads is "analogous to the way direct marketers used to send political mailers," she says. A new level of data The rich trail of information people leave on the Internet, however, is a "level of data we didn't have before," Steen says. Marketers can also gather a trail of information to track somebody's interest on one website and then advertise to them on another in what's known as behavioral-based "remarketing." "With remarketing, somebody has already expressed interest but then is able to be reached elsewhere," says Rob Saliterman, a Washington-based Google account executive. YouTube is a good place to target voters seeking information, he says. "We're seeing a lot of campaigns use paid advertising in YouTube." But mathematicians and data junkies are striving to go beyond behaviorally targeting ads to voters. They'd like to earn bragging rights by forecasting election results. The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 2010 reported a study that found Twitter tweets reflect voter preferences and come close to traditional election polls.

But social-analytics experts say applying complex algorithms to Twitter data, blogs, news sites and other media isn't yet perfect for predicting politics. "Algorithms are research in progress," says Michael Wu, principal scientist of analytics for Lithium. "Sarcasm there's no way to actually detect that." Still, Twitter has played a role in intelligence gathering on uprisings around the world, showing accuracy at gauging political sentiment. IDC's Fauscette thinks that social analytics applied to politics potentially has an edge over traditional polling. "The law of big numbers says the greater the sample size, the greater the chance of statistical significance," he says. All Facebook: Ohio Debuts Facebook Voting App Before Big Election http://allfacebook.com/facebook-pinning_b80406 Jennifer Moire March 2, 2012 Ohio voters who participate in Super Tuesdays election can show their civic pride on their Facebook profile thanks to a new application from the Secretary of States Facebook page. The app enables voters who like the page to put a virtual I voted sticker on their Facebook profile. The page also features a carousel slideshow that highlights initiatives and other social media accounts from Ohio Secretary of State John Husteds office. The Facebook page highlights programs to help active military and veterans vote as well as special efforts for small businesses in Ohio. The I heart sticker design was also democratically-chosen as part of an online Elect Your Sticker campaign that ran on the official Secretary of States website. In a statement, Secretary of State Husted tells us that the Facebook app is another way for the increasing number of mail-in voters to share their civic pride. As in many other states, its been a tradition in Ohio to get a voting sticker at the polls to both show pride in participating and to remind others to vote. We expect more Ohioans will be voting by mail this November and our Facebook app gives them a way they can still get their voting stickers. Its free and we think, an engaging way to share important voting information. The effort to attract younger and more tech-savvy voters ahead of a major presidential primary is a good strategy. A spokeswoman for Secretary of State Husted says, We are very excited about the possibilities and new tools (timeline) has to offer! We are looking forward to transitioning our current material and continuing to think of new ways to connect with our constituents. Washington Post: Obamas Birth Certificate Featured on New Facebook Timeline http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/44/post/president-obama-switches-to-facebook-timeline-includesbirth-certificate/2012/03/01/gIQAVshgkR_blog.html

Natalie Jennings March 2, 2012 President Obama converted his Facebook page to the timeline format Thursday morning, a day after the timeline option became available for branded pages. Facebook timeline allows people and now brand pages to note historical moments in their personal or company history on a chronological timeline. Obamas 2012 campaign staff, which administers the Barack Obama fan page, took advantage of the new format by featuring an image of the Presidents birth certificate emblazoned on a coffee mug at the beginning of it. The Obama campaign began selling mugs and other memorabilia with images of the presidents long-form birth certificate on its Web site shortly after it was released. The campaign filled in several other personal moments on his timeline: his first job in 1978 working the counter at Baskin-Robbins, his high school, college and law school graduations, the summer he met Michelle Robinson while working as an associate at a Chicago law firm, the Obamas wedding and the birth of their daughters, and the Obamas final student loan payment, made in 2004. Human Events: Romney Needs to Market Himself on Facebook, Twitter http://www.humanevents.com/2012/02/28/romney-needs-to-market-himself-on-facebook-twitter/ Al DiGuido February 28, 2012 Not many hours left before all the votes are counted in both Michigan and Arizona and every pundit on a broadcast channel seems to be licking their chops about Tuesday nights primary results. As we have said many times, mass media thrives on drama and intrigue. The Republican field continues to provide the networks and others with a reality show beyond compare. Who would have thought that the very important process of selecting the Republican candidate for the President of the United States would be covered like American Idol. Many of us will be glued to our television sets watching each network battle over who will announce the winner in both of these pivotal states first. As for me, I cant wait to see which network anchor or panel of experts makes the determination that Mitt Romney is in trouble just in case he loses his home state to Rick Santorum. The bigger question for my money is where Newt Gingrich finishes after all of the votes are counted. From where I sit, he seems to have the most to lose in Tuesdays primaries based on the online data we have been collecting. There is little doubt that the level of social media debate and politicking is reaching new levels of intensity. Heres this weeks view of the data: Facebook Friends Mitt Romney 1,497,245 up 14,551 Ron Paul 882,912 up 17,580 Newt Gingrich 288,652 up 4,790 Rick Santorum 159,669 up 15,541 President Barack Obama 25,382,819 up 120,153

 While Mitt Romney continues to maintain his strong leadership amongst all GOP candidates within Facebook, I continue to wonder if his campaign has forgotten the need to market himself within this venue. His page remained unchanged again this week. Based on the competitive field and their level of engagement in refreshing content within Facebook; Mitt is not connecting in the way that he could and should here. Ron Paul had a big week on Facebook. The candidate generated more friends than any of his fellow counterparts. Paul is making a big deal about the recent Rasmussen poll that indicates that he could beat Barack Obama in November. Unlike Romney, Paul is pushing his supporters in both Michigan and Arizona to get out and vote Tuesday. Likewise Newt Gingrich is running a banner unit on the left side of his page urging his supporters to go to the polls. The petition and bowing oil barons are still prominent on his page. For the last two weeks, Newt has been crushed in terms of gaining friends. Despite a gallant fight; it seems that this horse has run his race and will finish out of the money. Rick Santorum has had big weeks back-to-back. Second only to Ron Paul, Santorums social media strategy seems to be working. The Santorum page hasnt changed in the past week and neither has his relative standing in terms of the other candidates. While polls and media have put Santorum in the spotlight, it appears that his online strategy hasnt come close to building a strong foundation here as yet. Could a win in Michigan stimulate even more activity? We shall see. Twitter Followers Newt Gingrich 1,442,724 up 3,398 Ron Paul 387,420 up 11,244 Mitt Romney 351,669 up 9,421 Rick Santorum 147,062 up 13,043 President Barack Obama 12,744,960 up 131,414 While Newt has a strong and loyal Twitter following Gingrichs rate of growth here has slowed considerably. It seems that the fire and passion around the posts has left as well. We may be seeing the end of one of the stronger players within the field online. Ron Paul had another strong week as his followers continue to grow. Paul continues to defy the odds as the only true outlier in the final four. His message continues to resonate with a growing base. The Paul camp is tweeting proudly about the Rasmussen poll and his chances of beating Obama in the fall. Paul continues to rise each and every week that we have been tracking. Dont count him out as a factor in the race. Romney rising Mitt continues to show vitality within Twitter; up close to 10,000 new followers this week. However, like his Facebook, Mitts tweets lack the real zing and punch of a competitor. It would be well advised for the Tweet Team in the Romney camp to start leveraging some of those stump speeches in a place where the rest of us outside of the primary states can hear them. Santorum the Big Winner again Rick continues to have new energy online based on the high level of broadcast exposure he has received in recent weeks. Once again, though, while his weekly increase is the best of any of the candidates, he still has the smallest base of any of his competitors in the field. The online audience hasnt warmed to Santorum as yet and it doesnt seem as though the candidates camp is all that concerned at this point. Would Rick benefit by a potential Gingrich endorsement? My sense is yes, and dramatically so.

President Obama continues to ratchet up the volume and intensity of his online platform. His team is holding a clinic on leveraging the immediacy of the medium to be relevant in real time. Today Obamas Facebook page touts a speech that he gave at a convention of United Auto Workers Tuesday in Washington, D.C. in which he defended the auto bailouts. Under the banner of Placing bets on the American Worker and in front of one of the most powerful unions in the country, Obama reminded the audience that Mitt Romney once proclaimed Let Detroit Go Bankrupt. These comments directly attacking the Republican front runner are highlighted on both his Facebook page and within the Tweets on Twitter. There is little doubt that Obama re-election team is watching every word spoken by their potential adversaries and using online media to strike back instantly and aggressively. With a gargantuan audience of followers and friends online, there is little doubt that this message is being received in a big way. Each week, we can debate the validity of the numbers listed above. We can act as if what is happening online is truly immaterial to the final results of the election in November. There are some that would like to discount social media and the profile of folks that comprise it as left leaning or not in the mainstream of the American voting public. While wishful thinking may lead you down those paths; my view is that they all lead to the same dead end. Will every Twitter follower and Facebook friend vote their online preference in November? There is really no way to guarantee it. Like the poll information based on microscopic sample size data that we are fed each day by mass media as gospel, we must look at voter behavior and preference information from a 360 degree viewpoint. Ten years ago, online data could be viewed as skewed based on specific demographic and geographic parameters. In 2012 that potential bias has been totally removed. The online universe represents the people of America. It is truly a viable and increasingly important channel to study and understand. It appears that those running the Obama campaign understand it all too well. Can the Republican field gain that understanding in enough time to make a difference in November? Anybody want to bet? Tech President: How Social Media is Keeping the GOP Primary Going http://techpresident.com/news/21841/how-social-media-keeping-gop-primary-going Micah Sifry 02/28/2012 "Despite the increasing importance of social media in business, there is no solid evidence that it matters in politics," writes Gregory Ferenstein in AdAgeDigital in a lengthy article titled "Waiting for the 'Twitter Election?' Keep Waiting." His proof? --"Internet heavyweight Ron Paul hasn't won a single primary." --Mitt Romney's huge lead among Facebook fans (1.5 million to Paul's 869,000 and Rick Santorum's 149,000) didn't prevent him from losing the last three primaries in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri. --Tea Party belle Sharron Angle had seven times as many Facebook fans as Senator Harry Reid, but that didn't keep her from losing 50-45% in their 2010 race. --"On the internet, no one knows you didn't vote"--that is, social network connections are far weaker in motivating people to vote than face-to-face contact --Young people, who are the most intense social media users, are the least likely people to vote and far more likely to engage in other kinds of participation, like "pitching tents in Occupy protests, sharing 'I've Got a Crush on Obama' [videos] and volunteering in their neighborhoods."

Ferenstein has a point. The mainstream media definitely over-hypes factoids like how many followers a candidate has on Twitter or Facebook, and those companies are all too happy to keep getting that simplistic coverage. As I wrote back in January, "we're getting tired of stories or services claiming to find a clear correlation between chatter on Twitter or Facebook and the fortunes of the candidates running for president of the United States." And knocking on doors is the most effective way of getting out the vote (plus timely reminders from people who know you). But politics isn't only about voting; it's more deeply about organizing to get and keep power. And the evidence that social media is helping organized groups get more power--sometimes more than their raw numbers might get them at the ballot box--is staring us in the face. Exhibit A: the current Republican presidential primary. Why isn't the primary over? Mitt Romney "won" Iowa and he definitely won New Hampshire, which in the past was enough to get party leaders and members to close ranks behind the frontrunner. Obviously he's a relatively weak candidate, but he's not that much weaker than Bob Dole, who in 1996 won Iowa, narrowly lost New Hampshire, briefly battled challenges from Patrick Buchanan and Steve Forbes, and then rapidly won almost every contest from late February forward. Three factors have changed the contours of the GOP contest in this cycle, I would argue. First, the neverending series of TV debates--21 in all so far--which not only pull candidates and their senior teams away from retail politicking and towards mass media politicking, but have the effect of leveling the playing field for at least three and sometimes four contenders. Gingrich in particular has benefited from this dynamic. Second, the rise of SuperPacs and billionaire donors like Sheldon Adelson and Foster Freiss, whose injections of huge sums of cash in support of Gingrich and Santorum, respectively, have enabled them to get a second- and maybe even third-life after weak showings in early battles. But the third factor, which hasn't gotten nearly enough attention, is the way that social media and social networking is empowering many more conservative voters and activists who care passionately about certain issues, enabling them to create strong factions within the Republican electorate that are less controllable by party leaders. This isn't just the Ron Paul story, by the way. As Martin Avila, the conservative online strategist who worked on Paul's 2008 web campaign, said to me last Thursday on the PDPlus call: The pundits are completely stumped as to what's going on. They say Romney's got it locked up, and then everything just changes. I think that's a real consequence of what is happening online with the conservative movement. Up until this cycle, conservative grassroots activists haven't been online as much. On the left that happened a long time ago. Ron Paul was the start, then you had the Tea Party movement, and now you have the evangelicals on Facebook, on Twitter, discussing things on FreedomConnector. If all you do is look at how many followers a candidate has to their own Facebook or Twitter profile, you'll miss a lot of this picture. Consider, for example: On Facebook, there are dozens of groups devoted to Santorum, including one for every state. Most are closed (you have to ask to join, which means these are trying to be real organizing hubs), and they've each got anywhere from a handful to hundreds of members. Gingrich supporters on Facebook are similarly distributed. These kinds of groups have social capital that can't be turned off from above. -FreedomConnector.com, an open social network for conservatives (built by Avila) that launched a year ago at CPAC, has more than 168,000 users who are largely beyond the control of any Republican organization, even Freedom Works which runs the site. You can see from the regular polls done on the site, that Paul,

Santorum and Gingrich are all benefiting from passionate support bases that refuse to compromise on their beliefs. Local groups that reinforce each others' beliefs are not as easily controlled as national groups with big top-down email lists. There are nearly 7,000 groups on FreedomConnector and they've organized more than 2,000 events using the site. -In addition to billionaire Foster Freiss, Santorum is being lifted by an outpouring of small donors--more than 100,000 in February alone, his campaign says. On Fundly, a social fundraising site, the Rick Santorum page has nearly 3,000 donors who have built personal fundraising pages generating an average of about $80 each. By contrast, Romney has two donors who have created personal fundraising pages on the site, one of whom is his son Tagg. -And let us not forget the broad-based network that has grown up around Ron Paul, making him a much more viable contender than he'd be if it were up to elite gatekeepers from the media to the national GOP, who tend to view him as a wacko. The DailyPaul.com, a hub for Paul supporters, is getting 250,000 unique visitors a month, according to Compete.com. On the RonPaulForums, another hub for volunteers which is currently getting about 100,000 unique visitors a month, there are literally hundreds of people active on the site at any given moment. The list goes on. As Clay Shirky wrote in Here Comes Everybody, "Social tools dont create collective action-they merely remove the obstacles to it." The fracturing of the Republican base is a natural by-product to the emergence of more lateral, networked activity by grassroots activists reinforcing each other. Or, as Avila put it to me last week, "Broadbased, issue-focused, principled factions within the party have a much stronger voice." So, when someone says, social media isn't changing politics, think again. Right before our eyes, the power balance within the Republican coalition is being remade. And some part of that is due to grassroots conservatives using social networking. MSNBC: Rick Santorum Leads Rivals in Twitter, Facebook Buzz, New Analysis Shows http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/02/24/10490055-rick-santorum-leads-rivals-in-twitter-facebookbuzz-new-analysis-shows M. Alex Johnson February 24, 2012 Rick Santorum is coming under much closer and more skeptical scrutiny since he jumped to the top of Republican presidential polls this month, according to a computer-assisted analysis of social media data. For the first time, politically engaged users of Twitter and Facebook are buzzing about Santorum more than about any other Republican candidate. Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania, swept Republican voting in Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado on Feb. 7. Although all three contests were essentially beauty contests, with little official impact on the delegate count, Santorum's victories revived his campaign. Before Feb. 7, Santorum was generally running third behind former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia in most major national polls. Following those contests, he soared to the top of the major national polls, and he has remained there since.

Santorum's rise has been mirrored on social media, according to msnbc.com's analysis of nearly 2.2 million posts on Twitter and Facebook this month. And as the spotlight has focused on him, it has drawn opponents of his sharp-edged positions out of the shadows. The analysis examined posts through Thursday about the four remaining major Republican candidates, filtering out straight news reports and neutral posts, such as tweets noting that a candidate would be making a campaign appearance. The resulting sample was 1.2 million tweets and Facebook posts that expressed clear support for or opposition to one of them. In the week leading up to the Feb. 7 contests, those Facebook and Twitter users preferred to talk about Romney by a ratio of more than 6 to 1 over Santorum. Beginning Feb. 8, however, Santorum has been the No. 1 topic of conversation. This week, more than twofifths of every post expressing an opinion 41 percent were about Santorum, compared to 32 percent for Romney, 15 percent for Gingrich and 12 percent for Rep. Ron Paul of Texas. (The analysis uses a tool called ForSight, a data platform developed by Crimson Hexagon Inc., which is used by many media and research organizations to gauge public opinion in new media, among them the Pew Research Center and ESPN. The results aren't a scientific reflection of national opinion. Instead, they're a broad look at what is being said by Americans who follow politics and are active on Facebook, Twitter or both.) Nonpartisan research indicates that Republicans and Democrats use social networking sites in roughly equal proportions. The demographics have gradually been trending older and more conservative as the sites are adopted by a larger proportion of the American public, studies indicate. The msnbc.com analysis suggests that while people are much more enthusiastic about talking about Santorum, they're not any more enthusiastic about the man himself. On Feb. 7, before results of the three contests were known, 42 percent of Santorum's comments were positive to 58 percent negative; Thursday, after a debate Wednesday night in Mesa, Ariz., where Santorum came under sustained attack from Romney and Paul, the breakdown was 38 percent to 62 percent. Consistently, the largest driver of sentiment about Santorum is his strong stance against same-sex marriage, making up 18 percent of all opinions expressed about him and 28 percent of all negative sentiment this week proportions that have remained remarkably consistent since June, when msnbc.com began collecting data. In a Facebook post typical of the anti-Santorum commentary, Jay A. Small of Vancouver, Wash., wrote this week: From Rick Santorum's website: "Marriage is, and has always been through human history, a union of a man and woman and for a reason. These unions are special because they are the ones we all depend on to make new life and to connect those new lives to their mom and dad." So, Mr. Santorum, your religion's typical intolerance must then also stand for banning marriage between couples who do not choose, or are not able to procreate. But other issues are now emerging around which significant opposition is crystallizing. The sentiment that Santorum is "too conservative," particularly in the prominence of his religious views previously just one of

several scattered notions has broken into double digits this month, rising to 13 percent of all commentary and 20 percent of all negative opinion, such as this tweet by an Alaskan woman who describes herself as a Christian "pro-life supporter": The picture is different for Romney, who (at least according to msnbc.com's analysis) has yet to give voters a clear reason to vote for or against him. That suggests his supporters could be swayed by other candidates or that he still could galvanize support with clearly articulated positions. 'Most electable'? In fact, the No. 1 reason social media commentators give for supporting Romney both this week and going all the way back to June is their belief that he is the "most electable" Republican in the race, a sentiment that has driven 36 percent of all positive opinions this week: A quarter cite Romney's competence or leadership; no other issue even makes it into double digits. Likewise, opposition to Romney is widely scattered. A quarter of those expressing negative opinions this week cited his wealth, with many suggesting that he is out of touch with the majority of Americans, as in this tweet from Michaele Swiderski, a Tennessee woman who describes herself as a Jesus-loving conservative: But 15 percent also expressed concern over his Mormon faith, another 15 percent thought he was too closely tied to corporate interests, and 14 percent pinned the RINO label on him that is, "Republican In Name Only," or not truly conservative. Even in Michigan his native state, which holds an important primary Tuesday the single most mentioned word in social media posts about Romney this week (after his own name) isn't any political issue or position. It's "Santorum." PolicyMic: Barack Obama Campaign Manager Jim Messina Urges Millennials to Use Twitter and Facebook to Win the Social Media War Against Republicans http://www.policymic.com/articles/4542/barack-obama-campaign-manager-jim-messina-urges-millennialsto-use-twitter-and-facebook-to-win-the-social-media-war-against-republicans Justin Miller February 23, 2012 Barack Obamas campaign manager, Jim Messina, is working to solidify a strong student supporter-base much like that in the 2008 campaign. He is sweeping across the countrys college campuses in partnership with the Students For Obama group encouraging college students to get out the vote. The new plan is to revitalize this support through an intensive social media campaign using college students as the foot soldiers. But is there still the excitement there? A Students For Obama campaign kick-off event at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis featured the campaign manager and former deputy chief-of-staff explaining what the 2012 campaign can look like for college students. The campaign is looking to keep what was working with social media in 08 and hang on to that for dear life.

Messina and the other two speakers. bona fide liberals Congressman Keith Ellison (MN) and DNC Chairman and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak, made it clear what is expected from college students supporting Obama: Make your voice heard. If Messina has his way, Twitter, Facebook, and other popular social media sites will be heavily utilized as tools to show support for Obama and act as weapons to counteract attacks against him. Essentially it could create a grassroots PR campaign for Obama. When you hear people saying Obama is Kenyan, Obama is an Islamic fundamentalist, Obama is a socialist, Obama is this and that, fight back, Messina said. Post responses on Twitter, post on Facebook. Do whatever you need to do to show your support for him. In addition to traditional social media platforms, the Obama campaign will be implementing truth teams. Two million supporters will be recruited to debunk false myths about Obama and give automatic response to negative coverage. The Messina strategy of putting publicity in the hands of supporters through social media shows a greater trend developing in politics. It creates a strong grassroots following with much less effort. It also brings Obamas message to young peoples home turf: the internet. But this strategy could also take the control of out the Obama camps hands. Hoards of supporters offering their messages on such a large stage could end in a lack of cohesion and unnecessary confusion. While there are many unknowns as to how a crusade of young students using social media will battle Republicans, it is sure to be interesting. The plan might just be the final answer to how candidates will use the internet to their advantage. New York Times: Online Data Helping Campaigns Customize Ads http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/us/politics/campaigns-use-microtargeting-to-attractsupporters.html?_r=0 By Tanzina Vega February 20, 2012 Political campaigns, which have borrowed tricks from Madison Avenue for decades, are now fully engaged on the latest technological frontier in advertising: aiming specific ads at potential supporters based on where they live, the Web sites they visit and their voting records. One recent ad from the Mitt Romney campaign was geared toward committed party members, encouraging them to vote. A second ad, which focused on Mr. Romney as a family man, was shown to undecided voters. In recent primaries, two kinds of Republican voters have been seeing two different Mitt Romney video ads pop up on local and national news Web sites. The first, called Its Time to Return American Optimism, showed the candidate on the campaign trail explaining how this was an election to save the soul of America. It was aimed at committed party members to encourage a large turnout. The second video ad, geared toward voters who have not yet aligned themselves with a candidate, focused more on Mr. Romney as a family man. Versions of the two ads were seen online in Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Kenneth M. Goldstein, the president of the Campaign and Media Analysis Group at Kantar Media, part of the advertising giant WPP, said Mr. Romneys directed ads represented a sea change in political advertising. Forty years ago, youd watch the same evening news ad as your Democratic neighbor, Mr. Goldstein said. The technology that makes such customized advertising possible is called microtargeting, which is similar to the techniques nonpolitical advertisers use to serve up, for example, hotel ads online to people who had shopped for vacations recently. In the last few years, companies that collect data on how consumers behave both online and off and what charitable donations they make have combined that vast store of information with voter registration records. As a result, microtargeting allows campaigns to put specific messages in front of specific voters something that has increased in sophistication with the large buckets of data available to political consultants. Zac Moffatt, the digital director for Mr. Romneys campaign, worked with a company called Targeted Victory for the online ads. Two people in the same house could get different messages, Mr. Moffatt said. Not only will the message change, the type of content will change. Few campaigns like to talk about this kind of advertising. Representatives from the Obama campaign and the Gingrich campaign would not confirm whether they were using targeted ads tied to voter data. Saul Anuzis, chairman of the Republican National Committee on Technology, said he expected spending on digital political ads to reach 10 to 15 percent of campaign budgets in the 2012 election season. Those numbers pale beside what campaigns will spend on television or direct mail. But the chief benefit of microtargeting is that campaigns can spend their money more efficiently by finding a particular audience and paying $5 to $9 per thousand displays of an ad, Mr. Anuzis said. We can now literally target the household, Mr. Anuzis said. Microtargeting is largely done by a handful of campaign consultant groups including Aristotle, CampaignGrid and Targeted Victory, which collect some of their data from direct marketing companies like Acxiom and Experian. The companies are reluctant to discuss which candidates are their clients, but according to a Federal Election Commission filing, CampaignGrid does work with the Ron Paul super PAC, Endorse Liberty. The process for targeting a user with political messages takes three steps. The first two are common to any online marketing: a cookie, or digital marker, is dropped on a users computer after the user visits a Web site or makes a purchase, and that profile is matched with offline data like what charities a person supports, what type of credit card a person has and what type of car he or she drives. The political consultants then take a third step and match that data with voting records, including party registration and how often the person has voted in past election cycles, but not whom that person voted for. Throughout the process, the targeted consumers are tagged with an alphanumeric code, removing their names and making the data anonymous. So while the campaigns are not aiming at consumers by name only by the code the effect is the same. Campaigns are able to aim at specific possible voters across the Web. Instead of buying an ad on, say, The Miami Herald Web site, a campaign can buy an audience.

Another advantage is that these ads can be bought quickly using an auction process to obtain ad space when campaigns need to move rapidly to aim at an audience, for example, to counter a bad debate performance or an unflattering newspaper article. If you can get in front of a news story, if you can help frame the debate rather than respond to the debate, Mr. Anuzis said, that makes a big difference. John Simpson, media director at Blue State Digital, which worked with the Obama campaign in 2008, said bidding technology means strategists can get a campaign up and running very fast and also potentially pull it down very fast. In 2009, Chris Christie, then a candidate for governor in New Jersey, worked with CampaignGrid to respond to accusations from Gov. Jon S. Corzine that he supported cutting health care coverage including mammograms. In response, Mr. Christies campaign quickly created a video ad showing him sitting at a kitchen table with his wife and telling the story of his mothers struggle with breast cancer. It was aimed at female Republican voters who were searching for information on breast cancer. Its awful for the governor to try to desperately hold on to power by scaring people, Mr. Christie said at the end of the video. Mike DuHaime, a partner at Mercury Public Affairs who ran Mr. Christies campaign, said of the ad: I think the biggest thing in politics is just being able to move quickly. I dont know if it won us the campaign, but it kept us from losing. When Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana was running for re-election last year, his campaign used a number of ads with different messages. Blaise Hazelwood, the president of Grassroots Targeting, the company that worked on Mr. Jindals campaign, said voter registration data was critical to the success of the digital campaign. We want to hit the people who can actually go out and vote, Ms. Hazelwood said. The digital campaign ran in September and October, and the company placed ads online to reach registered Republicans as well as registered Democrats. There were more registered Democrats in the state, and early polling had shown that some were favorable towards Jindal, Ms. Hazelwood said. Critics say that the ability to limit political messages to registered voters toes the line of social discrimination. Daniel Kreiss, an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, called some of the targeting techniques a form of political redlining. These practices, as they get more sophisticated, leave entire segments of the population out of the political communication of the campaign, Professor Kreiss said, adding that campaigns arent going to spend resources on people who arent seen as being important. Prof. Joseph Turow of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania said that ads aimed at registered voters, while efficient for the campaign, benefited the candidate in another way. Different people getting different ideas about a candidate maximize the chances that a person would agree with you.

Mashable: Whos Winning the Twitter and Facebook Presidential Election http://mashable.com/2012/02/18/presidential-election-infographic/ Alissa Skelton February 18, 2012 President Barack Obamas Facebook and Twitter following leaves Republican presidential candidates in the dust. The president has more than 25 million Facebook Likes and more than 12.5 million Twitter followers. Since his 2008 campaign for president, Obama has changed the way the public engages with political candidates running for office. He was and still is the social-media-savvy candidate who reaches out to voters on the online platforms where they communicate. President Obamas social media accounts are primarily run by his campaign staff, but Obama signs the tweets he writes with -BO. In October 2011, Obama found one more way he could connect with young voters: by joining Tumblr, a blogging site used by tons of young people. Other candidates have followed Obamas tech-savvy lead. They have signed up for social media platforms and their staffs post regularly. On average, the 2012 presidential candidates post to their accounts two to five times per day, according to PRMarketing.com, who created the infographic below. When it comes to followers and Likes, Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich split second place. Romney comes in second with 1.4 million Facebook Likes, while Newt Gingrich has 1.4 million Twitter followers, ranking him the second most followed 2012 election candidate, although many of his followers accounts are inactive. A former Gingrich staffer told Gawker that Gingrich purchased Twitter followers on eBay. Ron Paul is the third most followed candidate with more than 862,000 Facebook Likes and more than 130,000 Twitter followers. Rick Santorum is next to last with nearly 130,000 Twitter followers and more than 138,000 Facebook Likes. Gary Johnson, the libertarian who has been in and out of the race, has the least amount of Facebook Likes and Twitter followers, but he is building his following. He has more than 23,000 Twitter followers and 149,000 Facebook Likes. Check out the infographic below. Twitter and Facebook numbers have increased for all candidates since the infographic was made. Followers and likes dont always translate to endorsements, but do you think a candidates following could turn into votes? The Hill: All Politics is Social http://thehill.com/opinion/op-ed/211439-all-politics-is-social Jonathan Spalter February 17, 2012 Social media was in its infancy during the last presidential election cycle. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton made a digital declaration that she was in it to win it, while candidate Obama famously announced his VP choice with a few taps of his thumbs. In 2008, social media was the new, bright, shiny object. In 2012, it is an essential component of any serious political campaign. Earlier this month, the Nevada Republican

Party set a precedent by becoming the first state party to use Twitter as the primary means of releasing official results from its presidential caucuses. Social media was in its infancy during the last presidential election cycle. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton made a digital declaration that she was in it to win it, while candidate Obama famously announced his VP choice with a few taps of his thumbs. In 2008, social media was the new, bright, shiny object. In 2012, it is an essential component of any serious political campaign. Earlier this month, the Nevada Republican Party set a precedent by becoming the first state party to use Twitter as the primary means of releasing official results from its presidential caucuses. Four years ago the presidential election cycle redefined traditional campaigning with the rapid embrace of social media. The connection caught fire with voters who were starved for something more than the usual soundbite, campaign slogan and 30-second ad. Today, as they sit on their campaign buses between stops, prepare to give a big speech or leave a town hall meeting with local voters, more and more candidates are turning to their mobile devices and using social media platforms to build a direct, personal and immediate connection with voters. Engaging voters at the nexus of mobile and social is now common practice on the campaign trail. From texting supporters to Get out the Vote to surprising your own aides with the news that youre pressing on to South Carolina (as former candidate Rick Perry did via Twitter), social media has led to a classic case of disintermediation the act of cutting out the middle man delivering an authentic connection between candidate and constituent. The best campaigns understand that Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are not just platforms to get the message out, but invaluable real-time tools for getting messages from voters, as well. Harnessing the chatter around key issues and looping it back into the campaign as platforms and strategies is considered a valuable information tool. And, there is certainly no shortage of feedback available for leaders in this country and around the world. 2011 produced a veritable cacophony of digital speech and opinion. Around the world, 103 million tweets were sent from a mobile device every day. Some 26 photos were uploaded to Instagram every second, and Facebook reported more than 425 million mobile monthly active users in December 2011. This growth shows no signs of abating, and much of it will take place over mobile devices. Now that smartphones outsell personal computers in this country, we prefer our Internet to go. Not all of the dialogue is substantive, of course. From Herman Cains smoking chief of staff to the rebuttal video from Jon Huntsmans three daughters, social media can offer a personal, behind-the-scenes view of a campaign and its candidate. Other uses are more formal. When the Obama camp recently joined the popular photo-sharing mobile application Instagram, the first pictures featured the commander in chief speaking to Iowa caucus voters via video chat. With almost half of Americans getting their news using mobile devices, there is a growing shift in the way information political and otherwise is consumed and shared. Rather than simply a 24-hour news cycle of information coming at us, social media offers a 24x7 give and take of opinions, dialogue and information. During the Republican primary debates, the Twitter-verse exploded with real-time discussions. Elections are fought and won with strategy, resources, discipline and a message that connects with the American people. Then, on Election Day, it all gets distilled down to simple math. In 2008, there were more than 100 million

Facebook users. Today, there are more than 800 million. In 2008, 12 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute. Today, that number is the equivalent of 2 days. 2008 also saw 300,000 tweets daily. Today, 200 million tweets are sent every day. So far, every presidential contenders level of influence is being measured, at least in part, by their digital visibility. Campaigns are analyzing the quantity of tweets, likes and unique visitors, to gauge hot topics and key messages. This influential and powerful information serves as a roadmap to campaigns as they navigate social media investments to attract more votes. At the same time, political activists are using social media to rally like-minded voters, and tech-savvy campaign volunteers are immersing themselves in all things social to maximize engagement and recruitment. But the question remains if all those likes, retweets, hashmarks, and shares will translate into actual votes. If so, the old adage from former House Speaker Tip ONeill All politics is local might be in need of an update for the wireless age all politics is social. Guardian: Obama, Facebook and the Power of Friendship: The 2012 Data Election http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-data-machine-facebookelection?newsfeed=true Ed Pilkington and Amanda Michel February 17, 2012 Barack Obama's re-election team are building a vast digital data operation that for the first time combines a unified database on millions of Americans with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never achieved before. Digital analysts predict this will be the first election cycle in which Facebook could become a dominant political force. The social media giant has grown exponentially since the last presidential election, rendering it for the first time a major campaigning tool that has the potential to transform friendship into a political weapon. Facebook is also being seen as a source of invaluable data on voters. The re-election team, Obama for America, will be inviting its supporters to log on to the campaign website via Facebook, thus allowing the campaign to access their personal data and add it to the central data store the largest, most detailed and potentially most powerful in the history of political campaigns. If 2008 was all about social media, 2012 is destined to become the "data election". "Facebook is now ubiquitous," says Dan Siroker, a former Google digital analyst who joined Obama's campaign in 2008 and now runs his own San Francisco-based analytics consultancy, Optimizely. "Whichever candidate uses Facebook the most effectively could win the war." For the past nine months a crack team of some of America's top data wonks has occupied an entire floor of the Prudential building in Chicago devising a digital campaign from the bottom up. The team draws much of its style and inspiration from the corporate sector, with its driving ambition to create a vote-garnering machine that is smooth, unobtrusive and ruthlessly efficient. Already more than 100 geeks, some recruited at top-flight university job fairs including Stanford, are assembled in the Prudential drawn from an array of disciplines: statisticians, predictive modellers, data mining experts, mathematicians, software engineers, bloggers, internet advertising experts and online organisers.

At the core is a single beating heart a unified computer database that gathers and refines information on millions of committed and potential Obama voters. The database will allow staff and volunteers at all levels of the campaign from the top strategists answering directly to Obama's campaign manager Jim Messina to the lowliest canvasser on the doorsteps of Ohio to unlock knowledge about individual voters and use it to target personalised messages that they hope will mobilise voters where it counts most. Every time an individual volunteers to help out for instance by offering to host a fundraising party for the president he or she will be asked to log onto the re-election website with their Facebook credentials. That in turn will engage Facebook Connect, the digital interface that shares a user's personal information with a third party. Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends directly into the central Obama database. "If you log in with Facebook, now the campaign has connected you with all your relationships," a digital campaign organiser who has worked on behalf of Obama says. The potential benefits of the strategy can already be felt. The Obama campaign this year has attracted about 1.3 million donors, 98% of whom have contributed $250 or less that's more than double the number at the same stage in 2008. At this rate, Obama is also well on the way towards staging the world's first billion-dollar campaign. Under its motto "Bigger, better, 2012", the Chicago team intends between now and election day in November to create a campaign powerhouse which will allow fundraisers, advertisers and state and local organisers to draw from the same data source. Joe Rospars, the campaign's chief digital strategist, told a seminar at the Guardian-sponsored Social Media Week that the aim was to create technology that encourages voters to get involved, in tune with Obama's emphasis on community organising. Campaign insiders say that the emphasis this year will be on efficiency more than any headline-grabbing technical wizardry. But that should not obscure how significant this year's presidential cycle will be in putting to the test the first custom-made digital campaign. Mark Sullivan, founder of Voter Activation Network, which manages the Democratic party's central database of voter information known as Vote Builder, says that "what we will see in 2012 will make 2008 look really primitive". Judith Freeman of New Organizing Institute, who worked on both John Kerry's 2004 and Obama's 2008 presidential campaigns, says there is a leap forward in technology every presidential cycle, and 2012 would be no exception. "There's a deadline it's got to be done by election day and that provides a huge push to make things happen." In 2008 the Obama digital team was lauded around the world for its groundbreaking work on internet fundraising. Yet in fact, the separation of its data on voters into several distinct silos forced high-level staffers to spend hours manually downloading information from one database to another.

The Obama team in 2008 did a good job in beginning to tear down those walls, releasing extraordinary fundraising energy in the process that raised about $500m online. This year the Chicago team hasn't knocked down the walls so much as dispensed with them altogether. They have built from the ground up a unified database that incorporates and connects everything the campaign knows about a voter within it. Rospars said that in 2012 they no longer had to try to integrate data in the campaign. "We are just one campaign now we built it from scratch." The centralised nature of the database may raise privacy issues as the election cycle progresses. Jeff Chester of the digital advertising watchdog Center for Digital Democracy, which has been calling for regulators to review the growth of digital marketing in politics, said that "this is beyond J Edgar Hoover's dream. In its rush to exploit the power of digital data to win re-election, the Obama campaign appears to be ignoring the ethical and moral implications." But from the vantage point of the campaign the benefits are evident. "Fusing your data into one central store is cheaper, quicker and allows you to be more targeted," said Jim Pugh, who was part of Obama's 2008 digital team and now works for the progressive online movement, Rebuild the Dream. The Obama database incorporates Vote Builder, a store of essential information such as age, postal address, occupation and voting history drawn from the voter files of 190 million active voters. It lines up and matches those voter files with data gathered from online interactions with the president's supporters notably the millions of pieces of information its army of canvassers collected across the nation during the 2008 race, a list of email addresses of supporters that it has amassed and that now stands at about 23 million, as well as the contact information of Obama's 25 million Facebook fans. Facebook itself has been transformed as a political campaign tool since 2008, simply by dint of its exponential growth. Four years ago there were about 40 million Facebook users in the US; now there are more than 160 million incorporating almost the entire voting public. The significance of the fusion of Facebook and voter file data is hard to overemphasise. "This is the Moneyball moment for politics," says Sam Graham-Felsen, Obama's chief blogger in 2008. "If you can figure out how to leverage the power of friendship, that opens up incredible possibilities." First among those possibilities is that the campaign can distribute customised content designed specifically for its Facebook fans to share with their much wider circle of friends. The messages can be honed to a particular demographic age, gender, etc as well as set of interests, and targeted on the most hotly contested parts of the most crucial battleground states. "Influencers" those people who tend to act as thought leaders among their friends on Facebook can be identified and prioritised. Teddy Goff, the digital director of the re-election team, told Social Media Week that as the year progresses there would be more and more "persuasion through interaction".

Individual voters would be given access to digital platforms from which they will be able to tell their own stories "and that's far more powerful than anything we can say", Goff said. "That will be the story of this election. People's own stories really moves votes." Goff said the campaign was focused on building relationships through social media. An Obama message would be crafted so that "not only can it be passed to your friends but to those friends that we think are most in need of passing it on to". The bottom line is that if you are sent a message from your Facebook friend encouraging you to turn up to an event or donate to Obama, you are vastly more likely to respond than if the request comes from an anonymous campaign staffer. The other door that data integration will further open in 2012 is personalised marketing. This has been the Holy Grail of political campaigners for decades: the idea that you can talk directly to voters and serve them customised messages. In the old world of snail mail, that could be achieved to some degree through direct marketing ie leaflets dropped into the letter box but that is expensive and far too slow with today's 24-hour news cycle. The fusion of information into a centralised database allows you to direct market online at much less cost and virtually instantaneously. The technique has begun to spread widely among commercial businesses over the past year, and it is only a matter of time before such hyper-targeting is standard across political campaigns. Indeed, we've already started to see it this year. The Obama campaign has already tailored a single donation request to 26 distinct segments of the voting public. The Republicans are also getting in on the act. Michele Bachmann used customised online advertising in Iowa to reach Republican voters only, sending to their computers messages with a local spin for each of the state's 99 counties. That helped her win Iowa's vaunted straw poll in August 2011 (though that didn't help her in the long run). Rick Perry sent God-praising commercials to Iowans who listed themselves as evangelicals on Facebook. The company CampaignGrid, that serves mainly Republican candidates, claims to be able to online market direct to targeted households. It has an integrated database on 110 million voters across America some 65% of the electorate to whom it can serve personalised ads, following them wherever they are browsing on the internet. Jeff Dittus, the company's co-founder, illustrates what this means. He worked on behalf of one unidentified Republican presidential candidate, serving online ads in the Miami-Dade region of Florida specifically to 400,000 individuals who had voted in at least two of the four previous Republican primaries. The adverts were further customised for gender, and for Spanish speaking. They were distributed to the individuals through internet ad exchanges that allow for instantaneous filtering of users the nanosecond they click onto a video on any one of four million websites. In that flash, if you fitted the criterion you were served with a 30-second pre-roll video from the candidate delivering a message to you that you would have found remarkably personal.

"I'm sure this is the future of digital political campaigning," said CampaignGrid's CEO Jeff Dittus. Drew Brighton, CEO of TargetSmart Communications, is hoping to do the same hyper-targeting for Democratic and progressive politicians and causes through his new product Target Blue. It matches up the details of up to 50m cookies embedded on individual computers with voter files and uses it to identify Democratic-leaning individuals to whom it can serve customised ads wherever they go on the web. The company is also developing a system for targeting Democratic voters through their computer IP addresses down to such tightly drawn areas or "IP zones" as just 20 households. That allows for microtargeting depending on the average income bracket, age profile and concerns of that tiny locality. The elephant in the room, of course, is television, which continues to dominate advertising spending by political campaigns. Most analysts agree that 2012 has come too soon for any equally transformative leaps forward in targeted or "addressable" TV advertising. Cable television can close in on geographic zones ranging from a few thousand to up to 100,000 viewers allowing campaigns to shape their messages to those clusters. The tighter the geographical area that can be drawn, the more efficient the TV advertising becomes as campaign managers can focus on primarilyDemocratic, Republican or independent neighbourhoods. But its still a relatively blunt instrument. The prize would be to be able to fuse cable subscriptions with voter files so that TV adverts could be sent to households of a specific political persuasion. Technically, that's already possible. Comcast Spotlight, the advertising arm of Comcast Cable, has run trials of commercial as opposed to political addressable advertising in Baltimore. Adverts custom-made to speak to various demographic groups were piped into 60,000 identified households, though the personal details were removed to protect privacy. The results confirmed the power of the technology: homes receiving addressable adverts tuned away a third less of the time than homes receiving untargeted commercials. Dan Sinagoga, who specialises in political advertising at Comcast Spotlight, says that all advertisers, but political ones in particular, "would like to be doing addressable advertising yesterday". But he said it was unlikely to happen in any great quantity in 2012 as there are too many hurdles, including concerns in Washington about the privacy of cable TV consumers. No such impediment will hold back the digital explosion this year. As an Obama insider puts it: "Give us less wood, and we'll make more fire." Slate: Obama's White Whale http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/victory_lab/2012/02/project_narwhal_how_a_top_secret _obama_campaign_program_could_change_the_2012_race_.html By Sasha Issenberg February 15, 2012 On Jan. 22, a young woman in a socially conservative corner of southwestern Ohio received a blast email from Stephanie Cutter, a deputy campaign manager for Barack Obama. Years earlier, the young woman had registered for updates on Obamas website, completing a form that asked for her email address and ZIP code. For a while, the emails she received from Obama and his Organizing for America apparatus were appeals to give money and sign petitions, and she responded to one that required that she provide her

name. The emails kept on coming, rarely with anything an Obama supporter could disagree with, and certainly not the type of hard-edged political message that could scare one away. But Cutters note was different. She boasted of a new administration rule that would require insurance plans to fully cover contraception as part of the presidents health care reform law, and encouraged her recipients to see the policy as reason to rally around Obamas re-election. Think about how different that is from what the candidates on the other side would do, Cutter wrote. Our opponents have been waging a war on womens healthattempting to defund Planned Parenthood, overturn Roe v. Wade, and everything in between. It was a message that sat well with the young Ohioan who received it. She was single, liberal, sensitive to medical costsbut she had never told the campaign any of those things, and the one piece of information she had provided (her ZIP code) could easily mark her as the type of traditionalist Midwestern woman who would recoil at efforts to liberalize access to birth control. Indeed, she found it hard to believe that many other residents of her ZIP code would look as favorably upon a rallying cry to defend Planned Parenthood as she did. Those who have worked with Obamas data say that it is an email that would have never been sent in 2008. The campaign knew very little about the 13 million people who had registered for online updates, not even their age or gender or party registration. Without the ability to filter its recipients based on those criteria, the campaign stuck to safe topics for email blasts and reserved its sharp-edged messages for individual delivery by direct mail or phone call. In those channels, the campaign could be certain of the political identities of those it was reaching, because the recipients had been profiled based on hundreds of personal characteristicsenough to guarantee that each message was aimed at a receptive audience. This year, however, as part of a project code-named Narwhal, Obamas team is working to link once completely separate repositories of information so that every fact gathered about a voter is available to every arm of the campaign. Such information-sharing would allow the person who crafts a provocative email about contraception to send it only to women with whom canvassers have personally discussed reproductive views or whom data-mining targeters have pinpointed as likely to be friendly to Obamas views on the issue. From a technological perspective, the 2012 campaign will look to many voters much the same as 2008 did. There will not be a major innovation that seems to herald a new era in electioneering, like 1996s debut of candidate Web pages or their use in fundraising four years later; like online organizing for campaign events in 2004 or the subsequent emergence of social media as a mass-communication tool in 2008. This years looming innovations in campaign mechanics will be imperceptible to the electorate, and the engineers at Obamas Chicago headquarters racing to complete Narwhal in time for the fall election season may be at work at one of the most important. If successful, Narwhal would fuse the multiple identities of the engaged citizenthe online activist, the offline voter, the donor, the volunteerinto a single, unified political profile. Traditionally, even the campaigns most intent on gathering varied types of data have had little strategy for getting all the information to work together. When computers started regularly appearing in campaign offices in the 1980s, different vendors developed distinct software packages for the varied work that went on there: volunteer-management programs, campaign finance and budgeting tools, voter-file interfaces that could spin off mailing labels or walk lists ready for neighborhood canvassers. The data were stored in different places, often through systems incapable of communicating with one another.

When Obama launched his candidacy in 2007, the departments of his campaign followed this pattern and developed their own repositories for the data they collected. State-level VoteBuilder databases could access rich information about peoples political activities that helped to refine statistical projections about their beliefs. The online databases developed by the firm Blue State Digital contained records of who registered for website and text-message updates, and how they responded to different appeals. The campaigns fundraising team assembled its own list of donors. The field team had its database of volunteers, called Build the Hope. Every unit within the campaign had their little fiefdom and a chief. People were very proprietary about their data, says a staffer at Obamas 2008 headquarters. They started as separate systems because thats the way it works. No one ever thought System B would get useful data for System Aand we werent planning for the long run from the beginning. By the time campaign officials realized that they were agglomerating unprecedented volumes of political informationand that it would all become more valuable as it was allowed to mingle across categoriesit was too late to rebuild their systems to make that sort of data-sharing easy. Even as the outside world marveled at their technical prowess, Obama campaign staffers were exasperated at what seemed like a basic system failure: They had records on 170 million potential voters, 13 million online supporters, 3 million campaign donors and at least as many volunteersbut no way of knowing who among them were the same people. By Election Day in 2008, the campaign could come up with only what national field director Jon Carson described as a Rube Goldberg data apparatus, that depended on manually moving individual bits from one database to the next. Staffers would take the finance departments contribution records and flag each donors record in a VoteBuilder database, but could rarely keep up with the volume of new people to track. New email signups came in even more quickly; at one point, as many as 100 volunteers enlisted into a virtual typing pool, copying Blue State Digital online contacts into the voter records. Permanently linking the campaigns various databases in real time has become one of the major projects for Obamas team this year. Full data integration would allow the campaign to target its online communication as sharply as it does its offline voter contact. When it comes to sensitive subjects like contraception, the campaign could rely on its extensive predictive models of individual attitudes and preferences to find friendly recipients. In the case of Cutters blast, that might mean pulling email addresses only for those who had identified themselves as women on their registration forms and whose voter records included a flag marking them as likely pro-abortion rights. More broadly, Narwhal would bring new efficiency across the campaigns operations. No longer will canvassers be dispatched to knock on the doors of people who have already volunteered to support Obama. And if a donor has given the maximum $2,500 in permitted contributions, emails will stop hitting him up for money and start asking him to volunteer instead. Those familiar with Narwhals development say the completion of such a technical infrastructure would also be a gift to future Democratic candidates who have struggled to organize political data that has been often arbitrarily siloed depending on which software vendor had primacy at a given moment. In a campaign that has grown obsessed with code-naming its initiatives, the integration project is known as Narwhal, after the tusked Arctic whale whose image (via a decal) adorns a wall adjacent to the campaigns engineering department, as first reported by Newsweek. Narwhal remains a work-in-progress. Campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt refused to discuss the project, and the actual origins of their projects code name are

obscure, but at Obamas headquarters the joke has become that reference to a mammal often called the unicorn of the sea has come to accurately describe an elusive quarry. Like much of what changes politics this year, Narwhal will remain below the surface, invisible to the outside world. Forbes:What Mitt Romney Should Do With His Facebook Page Now http://www.forbes.com/sites/haydnshaughnessy/2012/02/12/what-mitt-romney-should-do-with-hisfacebook-page-now/ Haydn Shaughnessy February 12, 2012 Is Mitt Romneys Republican selection campaign hampered by his poor Facebook presence, and an apparent lack of desire to engage? After the narrow victory in Maine, its time to look at what his social strategy says about the real Mitt. And it suggests: Mitt doesnt care. The aloofness could matter deeply later in the year. I speculated in an earlier post that the U.S. election could be won on Facebook. What prompted the thought was the incredible job Barack Obama is doing in building his personal following and carving his Facebook presence between different interest groups that he needs to appeal to during the Fall campaign. But its also important now. Romneys page on Facebook strikes me as particularly bad for a politician who needs to connect and for a campaign that is well aware of Obamas social media pedigree. Its almost as if the Romney team is not really trying. To put it right, I called on Amy Porterfield, Facebook and social media expert, and Michael Brito, senior VP at Edelman, and an expert in social business and social media. I threw some of my own thoughts into the mix too. Amy Porterfield: For Romney, his entire social media strategy is lacking the most important ingredient for social media success genuine engagement. Romney is stuck in the traditional media rut where the focus in on pushing out messages. Because of the rise of social media, its no longer acceptable to solely push your own agenda online, but rather more about getting involved in the conversations. Unfortunately, right now Romneys social media platform is completely one-sided. Haydn: I agree. Its bad enough to be culpable. Michael Brito (who is a little kinder and more pragmatic) In looking at Mitt Romneys Facebook page, there are a few things I would advise him (or his campaign to do) in order to maximize its effectiveness. On the creative side, the welcome tab is a little bland. It looks like there are too many banner advertisements and there is way too much scrolling to get all the content. What I do like is the live Twitter feed and would recommend that is higher up on the page.

Also, there is little consistency of the content shared in terms of time of day and frequency. The posts are shared on the page in some random order. I would advise the Romney team to begin using a social CRM publishing tool like Spredfast or Syncapse to help identify the right time(s) and the right content to post in order to achieve the maximum amount of engagement (i.e. Likes, Shares, Comments, etc.) Haydn: I think he also needs to look at how Obama is carving up his Facebook presence to serve special interest groups. Amy: On Facebook, theres absolutely no engagement. Thousands of people have posted on his page, and I could not find one fan post that was answered by Romney or his team. Although its not possible to address each post, its important to recognize that it does not have to be all or nothing. If Romney or his team took 30 minutes each day, thanking his supporters, commenting on their posts and listening to their concerns, he would not only have a keen understanding on what people are talking about, but he would also create solid, valuable relationships with Facebook users. As for Twitter, a surefire way to see if someone on Twitter is purely broadcasting (pushing out messages without interacting) is to check out their Twitter profile. A profile with only broadcasts and no tweets that begin with the @*twitterhandle+, means that there are no back and forth conversations taking place. When you check out Romneys Twitter profile, all you see are messages hes pushed back. Not a single sign of engagement. Michael: Of course, realizing that Mitt is super busy and cant respond to every comment, he (or some intern on the team) should periodically say thank you or respond to various questions within the comments. Its a good gesture and shows that he is an actual human who cares about people. Haydn: I wonder why Mitt is so under-invested in his Facebook presence. He has plenty of followers (over 1.4 million). Amy: Dont Post and Ditch On Facebook, Team Romney is notorious for posting and ditching. Specifically they post something, and then let everyone else talk amongst themselves without ever jumping back into the conversation. On Facebook, the way you create a fan for life (or in his case, a loyal supporter) is by getting involved in the back and forth conversations. Thats where it really counts! Engagement is where the real relationships start. By posting and ditching, it looks as if Romney is not interested in his fans opinions or feedback. Quick tip for Romney: When you post something new, stick around for a few minutes and get involved in the conversation you started. A few back and forth conversations with your fans will go a long way with loyal supports as well as those that are still on the fence. Michael:

I would suggest some type of live chat in Facebook or a live stream of him interacting with the Facebook community. That would certainly drive up engagement and increase his fan base at the same time. Amy: Go Behind The Scenes: A great way to create a connection with users on social media sites it to have a little fun. Romneys posts tend to be stiff and lack a conversational, friendly tone. One surefire way to show the human side of his campaign is to pull back the curtains and post more pictures from the campaign trail, fun stories about people he meets and short quips about his experiences. Of course, he needs to get his message out there, but on Facebook, Twitter and all the other social media sites, if you focus completely on business, you lose your audience fast. Step away from the political soapbox and mix it up to have a little fun with your social media audiences. The more real you come across, the stronger the support. Haydn: I hope those points raise some interest in the Romney camp. But if not they should help anyone who is tempted to use Facebook to develop a personality fronted-brand. The message is clear engagement takes something extra, like a busy leader, or in this case candidate, showing himself willing and humble enough to mix it with his fans. POLITICO: Facebook/POLITICO Poll: Florida Results Wont Influence Nevada Voters Decisions http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/2012/02/facebookpolitico-poll-florida-results-wontinfluence-113400.html Emily Schultheis February 3, 2012 Mitt Romney may have won a big victory in Florida Tuesday night, but Nevada Facebook users aren't basing their votes on that win, according to a Facebook/POLITICO poll. Eighty-five percent of those surveyed said Romney's Florida win won't influence their vote in tomorrow's caucuses, compared with just 8 percent who said it would affect their vote and 7 percent who said it might affect their vote. Younger voters were more likely to be influenced by the Florida results: 12 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds said Florida might affect their vote, compared with 7 percent of 25- to 34-year olds, 3 percent of 35- to 49year-olds and 8 percent of all other age groups (or users who didn't list their age). The results only represent the sentiments of Nevada users on Facebook, not registered voters or likely GOP caucus voters that tend to be more reliable barometers of caucus elections. The Facebook poll, for instance, doesn't exclude Democrats or independents. Facebook and POLITICO are running a daily poll to gauge Facebook users opinions about the 2012 presidential primaries. The first poll, of South Carolina Facebook users, was released on Jan. 12. The poll surveyed 1,001 adult Facebook users in Nevada on Thursday. Slate: For Sale: Detailed Voter Profiles http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/victory_lab/2012/01/the_co_op_and_the_data_trust_the

_dnc_and_rnc_get_into_the_data_mining_business_.html By Sasha Issenberg January 30, 2012 The big story of this campaign season has been the rise of Super-PACs, but they are not the only quasiindependent power that could redefine the modern political enterprise. Both the Democratic and Republican national committees have embarked on plans to develop data hubs in the hopes of becoming players in the vibrant private-sector marketplace for voter data. Party bosses have collected information about voters that interest groups like labor unions and the Koch-funded FreedomWorks would pay big money to access. Will the parties be willing to trade their most sensitive, tactically valuable data for an influx of cash? For decades, the most prized asset a state Democratic Party owned was its voter file. In its simplest form, a voter file is a roster of registered voters assembled from the rolls of local election authorities. But state parties were able to add reams of individual-level information gleaned from years of interacting with voters: their phone numbers, volunteer histories, and pet issues. In some states, the voter file provided enough texture to offer an ethnographic lens on local activist culture. The New Hampshire file, for instance, flagged individuals who had displayed lawn signs or brought food to a campaign headquarters to feed volunteers. This was information that campaigns could not get elsewhere, and party bosses put a price on it, either selling their voter file to candidates or saving it as a prize that could be extended only to those they endorsedoften a crucial way of protecting incumbents or playing favorites in primaries. After 2000, however, Democratic strategists at the national level came to believe that having their partys voter data divided across 50 different fiefdomsoften maintained in distinctive formats, accessible only by incompatible software systemslimited its value. The world of campaigns was undergoing a major shift from looking at voters primarily at the precinct level to profiling them according to individual attributes. Computing power had improved dramatically, allowing campaigns to process voter files in new and productive ways, especially when they could be mashed up with records from commercial data vendors that documented individual buying patterns, memberships, and subscriptions. As the 2004 election season approached, DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe offered state parties a deal: If they shared their files with the DNC, the national party would return the records brimming with new personal details acquired in bulk from commercial data vendor InfoUSA. McAuliffes database was largely a flop, and only under his successor Howard Dean did the party realize its goal of developing a workable national voter file that presidential candidates and state parties could use. But it quickly became evident that a national party was a poor custodian of such an asset. A list of nearly 170 million adultslarger than nearly all commercial databases except for those maintained by credit-rating agenciesrequired computing power and engineering expertise that could never be satisfied by party budgets that had been reined by new campaign-finance laws. Even once a list had been developed, those same regulations limited a partys ability to share its resource with its allies. On the Democratic side, some of those allies set out to develop their own voter file, outside the Federal Election Commissions oversight. In 2006, former Clinton aides Laura Quinn and Harold Ickesamong a cadre of old party hands suspicious of Dean and his 50-state strategyraised $5 million from private investors, including George Soros, to build a private data warehouse with records for the entire voting-age population. Called Catalist, the theoretically for-profit company imagined itself as a public utility, with less interest in returning a profit to its investors than becoming an indispensable tactical resource for the American left.

Their customers included the major labor unions, womens and environmental groups, and occasionally campaigns who considered the DNCs database insufficientincluding Barack Obamas in 2008. Catalist did the basic work of stitching together lists from local election officials, but some of the most valuable data came from its customers. The company described itself as a consortium, and every contract required a customer to contribute something of value back to Catalist. Rock the Vote used Catalist to identify adults it could target as part of its registration drivesin exchange, it put personal information gleaned during those drives back onto Catalists servers. Other Catalist clients would add data points from their own interactions with those voters: EMILYs List flagged some as pro-choice, the Sierra Club marked others as donors. Those touches of individual detail helped to form well-rounded individual portraits of political behavior that didnt exist on file at the board of elections. After a while, algorithms could mine those portraits for patterns for socalled look-alike models: What traits predicted whether someone was a likely donor to an environmental cause? Or an unregistered pro-choice voter?

Political data was being converted from a commodity bought in bulk to a boutique creative product, and Catalist created such a robust demand for it that the DNC has embarked on an ambitious plan to win back some of their lucrative business. In an email to liberal interest groups and consultants earlier this month, party officials announced that they had partnered with one of Catalists competitors, TargetSmart Communications, to make the party voter files available to lefty and nonpartisan groups on a state-by-state basis. (All but a handful of state parties have signed on thus far.) This new Voting List Management Cooperativewhich Democratic operatives are calling the Co-opoffers electoral data thats being marketed as fresher than Catalists. The freshness claim is based on the fact that political parties still have a privileged place in reading the electorate: Party activists take stock of who has moved or died before local election authorities get around to pruning their files and they keep the most current updates on who has voted early or by absentee ballot. (Some local authorities release that information to parties before its available to the broader public.) A share of each purchase from the Co-op will be sent back to the state parties, which helped to create and maintain the lists but never before had a steady channel to sell them to a broad audience. Making them accessible on a national level creates a whole new revenue stream, says New Hampshire Democratic boss Ray Buckley, who leads the Association of State Democratic Chairs. Its not costing us anything. It has the potential of a good return or an awesome return. But despite the prospects for new revenue, Democratic leaders have been wary of relinquishing control over some of their most valuable resources to paying customers who could use it to undermine the partys interests, particularly in primaries. The DNC will keep some of the boutique data it manufactures statistical models for candidates and parties to useout of the databases that most Co-op clients will be able to access. And the Co-op will closely monitor its clients, too: Under its rules, state party chairs will have a veto over each sale, allowing them to deny rival operatives or dissident unions use of their data. Indeed, party support is at the heart of the sales pitch the Co-op is making to customers currently paying Catalist subscriber fees: If they switch, their money will no longer go into a private companys coffers but help to fund party activities. It is an appeal that may be more persuasive to consultants and pollsters who rely on state party chairs for their business than outside groups, which prize their autonomy and generally feel they owe little fealty to party bosses. We are not Democrats and not all of our members are Democrats, says Mike Podhorzer, the political director of the AFL-CIO, which was one of Catalists first customers and relied on the companys data when it

backed a liberal challenger to dislodge incumbent Democratic Sen. Blanche Lambert Lincoln in a 2010 Arkansas primary. A lot of other groups are in the same position. Years ago, when Catalist started, that was part of the reason for doing it. There was a sense, at least for progressives, that having our own independent source of data was important. Now Republicans, who developed their own national voter file 15 years before the Democrats, are scrambling to come up with an apparatus to share and market voter information. Like the Co-op, the Data Trust recently established by the Republican National Committee will be a hybrid, a private company that party bosses built but cant formally run. Were very much in the same boat as the Democrats, looking for a better alternative in terms of how to manage our database, says former Michigan Republican Party boss Saul Anuzis, who now chairs the RNCs technology committee. In the aftermath of 2004, Karl Rove looked warily upon Catalists efforts to build an apparatus outside the national party leadership to house the data for targeting voters. I thought at first it was a comment on their inability to raise money on the national level, that they had to do it on the outside, but it may have been that they were just ahead of the power curve in figuring out how to do it, Rove says of the Democrats. I think in 2009 and 10 they did move ahead of us, because of the inability of the national party to keep pace. Rove, now the chief strategist behind the American Crossroads Super-PAC, finds himself in much the same situation Democrats did six years ago. His party was outmaneuvered in the last presidential election, and responded by anointing a party chairman so distrusted by party elites that many reconsidered their thinking about the value of outside institutions to manage an entire movements tactics. (The role of Howard Dean was played by Michael Steele.) When Rove first convened a group of Republican operatives to his home on Washingtons Weaver Terrace nearly two years ago with the goal of designing a single electioneering machine to consolidate the rights fragmented interest groups, Catalist was an obvious model. In designing the Data Trust, Republicans have struggled to build a party-chartered independent business that allies will want to use. The terrain is perhaps even more precarious than it was when Catalist was formed; Tea Party challenges to Republican incumbents have shown how easy it is for the partys interests to diverge from those of its interest-group. Negotiations within the RNC had focused on how much influence should go to outside players like Roves Crossroads or the network of groups funded by the Koch brothersand for now the partys interests have won out, settling on a model closer to the Democrats new data Co-op than to Catalist. The RNC has structured the Data Trust as a private company with as much party DNA in it as possible: Its CEO is former RNC chief of staff Anne Hathaway, and three seats on its have been given to former committee chairmen: Ed Gillespie, Jim Nicholson, and Mike Duncan. Party officials are insistent that the arrangement is only a short-term contract that can be easily severed: Because the deal is for a list share, the RNC can pull its data out on a whim and quit the trust for good. While the new company will add commercial data to party files, there is little ambition for it to develop the data-mining expertise to work through it. In fact, the entire Data Trust staff is likely to be smaller than the number of Catalist statisticians who work only on developing what they describe as data synthetics. Our philosophical model is a little more open-source, says Anuzis, the RNC technology committee chair. It doesnt make sense for the Republican party to duplicate what the market can do. Given the importance, and value, of data in this election, the Republican faith in markets will be tested in more ways than one in 2012.

New York Times: Facebook Users to Put Political Views Up in Lights on Times Square http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/facebook-users-to-put-political-views-up-in-lights-ontimes-square/ Tanzina Vega January 29, 2012 As the country prepares for this years presidential election, political devotees have been following the nuances of every debate, caucus, straw poll and primary. A new application for Facebook users, however, is intended to encourage those who are not as engaged to talk about the election issues that are most important to them. The new app was created during a 24-hour hackathon this month with engineers from Facebook and representatives from the advertising agency R/GA, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, at Facebooks Manhattan headquarters. The goal was to create a social application that could share users political views on digital billboards in Times Square. Were at the intersection of social media and branded event advertising, John Mayo-Smith, executive vice president and chief technology officer at R/GA , said to the group. R/GA has worked with Times Square2, which owns the Thomson Reuters and Nasdaq signs in Times Square, on other interactive projects for brands including Verizon, Nike and McCormick. At Facebook headquarters, a group of about 20 broke into three smaller groups to brainstorm on how to create an app that brought together the billboards, Facebook and the election. Facts dont spread. Emotions do spread, said Paul Adams, a brand experience manager at Facebook, in a presentation before the group. We need to think about what an interaction looks like in that environment, he said, referring to Times Square. The groups agreed that politics was a polarizing subject that could be tricky to deal with on Facebook. To limit conflicts, the developers decided to focus on nine issues: the economy, health care, immigration, social issues, energy, Social Security, debt, national security and the environment. They also decided not to focus on a specific candidate, allowing the app to be used throughout the election cycle. The result was an app called 2012 Matters: What Matters Most. Starting this week, Facebook users will see poll questions in their newsfeeds asking them which of two issues matters more say, the economy or the environment. When a user answers the question, the result will show up on that users personal news feed and on friends newsfeeds. The friends also will be prompted to take the poll. The poll questions will lead users to the page where they can install the app from their mobile phones or from their desktops facebook.com/2012matters. Once the app is installed, they can rank the three issues that are most important to them and opt in to having the results, including their Facebook profile photos, broadcast on the Reuters billboards. Data showing which issue is most important to users in each state will be posted across the street on the Nasdaq digital billboard.

Ad Age: Paul-Affiliated Super PAC Tests Limits of Mostly Digital Campaign http://adage.com/article/campaign-trail/paul-affiliated-super-pac-tests-limits-digital-campaign/232261/ Ana Radelat January 21, 2012 Endorse Liberty, a Super PAC backing Texas Rep. Ron Paul, has made it its mission to focus almost solely on Internet advertising. And while it's had success so far, it's now brushing up the limits of an all-digital effort. President Barack Obama, of course, was in the forefront of digital political advertising when he ran for the White House in 2008. And while many followed suit, most politicians, including President Obama, used the Internet in 2008 and 2010 primarily to raise money, not votes. That's changing this time around as candidates and PACs look to drum up as many votes as they do dollars on the web. Still, with the exception of Endorse Liberty, none of the campaigns or Super PACs involved in the presidential race have concentrated the overwhelming majority of their efforts on the Web. A Google employee familiar with the matter said Endorse Liberty is the frontrunner in web-based advertising. FEC documents back this up. The group has spent nearly $4 million since it was founded last month, most of it on Google pop up ads, YouTube videos and advertisements on Facebook. Most of the pop up ads have positive messages about Mr. Paul and his position on issues. It's not all positive, however. The group's "Fake Politicians Channel" on YouTube features impostors of Mr. Paul's political rivals, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. Endorse Liberty's Internet campaign was used ahead of Iowa and New Hampshire and is now running in South Carolina and Florida. The Super PAC was founded by young internet entrepreneurs who like Mr. Paul's brand of Republicanism. Jeffrey Harmon, 29, who has a background in social media marketing, is a co-founder of the political action committee. So is Steve Oskoui, the 30-something CEO of Smiley Media, an Internet advertising network. Mr. Harmon doesn't own a TV set. He believes the internet is the future of political advertising because it allows you to target your message. "It's significantly more effective," he said." And we know what we're doing." Mr. Harmon credits Endorse Liberty's Internet campaign in Iowa for Mr. Paul's strong support among young voters in that state's caucuses. But he admits there's one weakness -- a big one -- in Endorse Liberty's digital campaign. "We have a hard time reaching 50-plus voters because they're not on the Internet," Mr. Harmon said. Endorse Liberty is running its first TV ads in Florida, home to many older Republican voters. Unlike candidate campaign committees, there are no limits on what a Super PAC can raise or spend. Endorse Liberty declined to reveal its donors. Mr. Harmon said they were "entrepreneurs and artists."

"We're not your typical businessman," he said. . One of the few limits imposed on the groups is that they cannot work in conjunction with the candidates they seek to support. Mr. Harmon said he has never met Mr. Paul or anybody on the Texas congressman's campaign staff. Endorse Liberty recently changed its disclosure frequency with the Federal Election Commission so its donors don't have to be revealed until midnight on Jan. 31after polls in Florida are closed. While TV advertising will take a lion's share of the advertising dollars in this campaign cycle, the Google salesman said "digital is going to have more and more impact." There are estimates that some presidential campaigns will spend 10% or more of their advertising budget on digital ad buys and in expectation of this growing trend, Google has bolstered its online sales force. Geographical targeting on the web isn't the only method being used by politicians these days. Indeed, they're increasingly turning to behavioral targeting. Politically active web users searching for Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich, for example, would eventually be served Endorse Liberty ads featuring positive messages about Congressman Paul. Facebook, too, allows campaigns to target a specific demographic and certain interests because its pages contain a slew of personal information. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who dropped out of the race this week, marketed his faith-based campaign to Iowans who identified themselves as Christians on Facebook. Fox News: Republican Candidates Challenge Dem Dominance of Social Media http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/20/republican-presidential-candidates-rely-on-facebook-twitter/ Brooke Auxier January 20, 2012 COLLEGE PARK The crowded pack of Republican presidential candidates has made social media campaigning an integral part of their effort to win the White House this year, cutting into the advantage Democrats have traditionally held in online outreach, social media analysts said. With Web users spending more and more time with services like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the popular social networks have become a key battleground in the 2012 campaign. In the past two presidential election cycles, harnessing the power of the Web helped Democratic candidates develop an advantage over their opponents. In 2004, Howard Dean's online outreach helped him raise more money in small dollar amounts than any other Democratic candidate that cycle. In 2008, President Obama used social media and online communities to out-organize and out-fundraise his opponents on the way to the White House. This year, Republicans are chipping away at that Democratic dominance.

"I definitely think Republicans are in the game when it comes to social media and the 2012 elections," said Jennifer Moire, a communications consultant and social media and 2012 elections blogger. "I think they have certainly closed the gap with the Democrats." The Republican candidates are developing interactive applications for fundraising, creating their own Internet memes and have transformed phone banking -- a traditional tactic where supporters make phone calls to voters on behalf of candidates -- into a social online game. Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich -- and President Obama -- all have online call centers. They allow supporters to make calls to voters in critical states identified by the campaigns directly from their computers or smartphones. But the Gingrich campaign turned the exercise into a social competition. The campaign website newtsnetwork.com, tracks the day's top callers and displays their name, avatar and numbers of calls made. Another popular social media campaign tactic this cycle: producing premade Facebook and Twitter profile pictures of the candidates that supporters use to show off their political affiliation. Frontrunner Mitt Romney, for example, introduced a Facebook initiative called "Stand with Mitt" where supporters are encouraged to print a sign produced by the campaign reading: "Stands with Mitt." Supporters are instructed to add their names to the sign, take it to an event or display it in their home, take a picture and then share that picture on Facebook. The result: a flood of pictures of Romney supporters across the country holding similar signs posted to Twitter and Facebook. For many candidates, an effective social media strategy has become increasingly important as the impact of traditional campaign techniques -- television ads, for example -- has diminished and the reach of social networks has grown. "You are building a campaign in which you're going to engage people, constantly motivate them, and keep them in the loop, and there is perhaps no better medium to do that than social media right now," said Leonard Steinhorn, professor of public communications at American University. Since August 2008, the number of active Facebook users has grown from 100 million to 800 million today. Twitter's user base has grown from 75 million at the end of 2009 to 468 million this month, according to RJ Metrics and Twopcharts, two websites that monitor the social network. Despite the growth, campaigns still appear to be paying more attention -- and spending money on -traditional political tactics such as in-person organizing and TV advertising. Going forward, that is likely to change. "Where voters are, campaigns will follow," Moire said. "In the future, the mix of campaign tactics may shift to favor social media as more voters use social media networks," she said. Social media is a valuable and low-cost method for campaigns to reach supporters. But, Moire said, "Social media needs to be an important part of the overall communication mix for campaigns. I don't think it is the end-all, be-all."

Today, simply having a presence on the social networks is not enough. Presidential hopefuls must work hard to stand out. Jon Huntsman, who dropped out of the race last week, developed a Twitter campaign called the "Huntsman Twitter Take Over." His goal: generate 1,000 tweets per day that included @JonHuntsman, Jon Huntsman, or the hashtags #Jon2012 and #JointheHunt. The number of tweets per day was displayed in real-time on the campaign site, jon2012.com. A critical aspect of social networks is the ease with which candidates can spread their message not only to supporters, but to supporters, friends and acquaintances with no additional cost to the campaigns. Gingrich, for example, made it simple for his supporters to share selected positive news stories about the candidate on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, dubbing people who do so "Newt Influencers." Though Republicans have caught up, analysts said Obama's campaign will be a dominant force on social networks during the general election. Their latest innovation: an official blog on Tumblr, a social blog network. The blog highlights relevant infographics, tweets and photos from the campaign, making it easy for supporters on the network to re-blog the items and share them with friends. The Atlantic: Doing Digital For Romney: An Interview With Zac Moffatt http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/01/doing-digital-for-romney-an-interview-with-zacmoffatt/251495/ By Nancy Scola January 18, 2012 What exactly do you spend your days thinking about when you're a digital director of a presidential campaign that's on track to win the Republican nomination? Zac Moffatt, 32, leads the digital side of the Mitt Romney campaign. He moved up to Boston last spring with his wife after some years in Virginia and jobs throughout Republican politics, including work on Bush-Cheney '04, with the Republican National Committee, and a variety of high and low profile races with his firm, Targeted Victory. We talked recently about the shortcomings of judging digital by the same sort of raw metrics we apply to, say fundraising (see, the Washington Post's @MentionMachine ), about how much of tech politics is happening behind the scenes, and about what digital success looks like. "It's amazing to me that people are talking about social media, about counting numbers," observes Moffatt, "and yet aren't getting on ballots in primary states ." When it came to qualifying Romney for the Virginia primary to be held in March, "the political team knew two months in advance what we wanted to do," he says. "We sent out emails segmented to specific areas, with different senders tied to each area. When people came in through Twitter, we moved them through the funnel into signing up an account with MyMitt," the campaign's internal mobilization tool, "and we followed up with a phone call."

That top-to-bottom, proactive, thoughtful application of digital tools to political necessities is what everyone talks about doing, says Moffatt. But not all campaigns are. It helps, he says, that he's senior staff, with the same access inside the campaign as the political or communications director. One group of folks known for a similar approach: the Obama campaign, which Moffatt is quick to compliment -- with a dash of expectation-

setting. "Obviously, they're very fortunate," he says. "They have a huge head start because they've been building it for six years." WHAT IT TAKES TO GET STARTED Romney '12 started from scratch, says Moffatt. Challenging, yes, but not without its advantages, such as having no legacy of circa-2007 tools and thinking to build from. Of course, that presented endless choices to be made on the compressed schedule of a presidential campaign. Moffatt describes his strategy as creating for the short-term with one eye constantly on the long game. "We're building the perfect digital and offline model to make it through the primary process," he says. "It wouldn't make much sense for me to build out a national program if we didn't make it through the primaries. And if we make it through the primaries, we're going to run a very different campaign in the general." The nature of a presidential campaign can create tensions for website designers and architects. For example, the "carousel," a design feature popular with many sites today that presents a shifting array of images and topics on which to focus, can be used to speak to true believers, potential converts, influential observers, or some mix of all. But the choices get even more difficult when it comes to increasingly important mobile technologies. "Mobile is about what you can strip down to the most basic and still do the most for the most people," forcing decisions about who to appeal to in that reduced real estate. And the unique chronology of an American presidential race -- both incredibly short and sometimes painfully long -- leads to choices made under the gun that stick around for the duration. Does your call-from-home tool connect you right to a voter, as Romney's does? Or does it rely upon the volunteer to make the call, as Obama's does? There are legal and data implications baked into each, says Moffatt. "You're making certain structural determinations," he says, "about what CMS [content management system] to build on, how you're going to run your ad program, what you're design process is going to be, how you're going to do your list segmentations, all that, that you're going to have to live with for the next year." Some of those structural choices, Moffatt suggests, reflect more of a commitment to the long-haul than others. MittRomney.com runs on Drupal, a robust open-source system. A close observer of WordPress, the blogging and CMS tool, noted back in May that six Republican presidential candidates were then running on that platform : Bachmann, Cain, Johnson, Paul, Perry, and Roemer. Meanwhile, Santorum, Gingrich, and Huntsman joined Romney on Drupal. "Building a website on WordPress is awesome for a congressional or statewide race," says Moffatt. "But I don't know how you would run a presidential built on that. If people had done better, I think they'd have to rebuild everything in the next two months." Moffatt does it all with a digital team of ten people, he says, some of them shared with other departments. That can seem low, especially given the prominence and significance of the Romney campaign; according to a knowledgeable source, Obama '08 at this point in the process had about double the number dedicated to its online team. "No doubt," he says with a laugh. "I'd love to have their design and creative teams." PLAYING BIG BY REACHING OUT "That infographic that they did for their millionth donor?," he says of this cycle's Team Obama. "That was awesome. But that's three or four designers and programmers dedicated to that for 'x' amount of time. What primary candidate can do that?" Team Romney's not above the occasional, humbler visualization of their own. But he insists that stacking up his team next to their team is not an apples-to-apples comparison. Running small, Moffatt says, means "that we go out and find companies whose size we can leverage, experts we can work with, that let us be much larger than our size."

Often, that means getting used to outsourcing much of your engagement to platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, which Moffatt calls the biggest change from 2008 to 2012. "We're going to have people watch one of our rich video units online," says Moffatt, "engage with our campaign, syndicate the message through social sharing, vote for us, and convince their friends to do the same, and yet never have been MittRomney.com. We're totally comfortable with that. You want someone to go to your website, because that's where you're going to have the richest conversation. But you're not going to pass on someone who only wants to engage with you on Facebook. Romney's strategy requires homing in on people we're they live online -- and often, in 2012, they can only be reached online. "We call them off-the-gridders," says Moffatt. "We buy advertising for people who don't watch live television any more. We have to find ways to get them to watch our video online. We have an active engagement with Hulu, with YouTube. We're seeing that again and again in our polling and focus tests: people haven't been seeing our TV spots, but they know what they are, because they've seen them on Hulu. It's a testament to a new model of consumption. Governor Romney gets it. He's on the road all the time. He doesn't get to sit in front of the TV. He has his iPad, and when he gets home, he probably has a DVR that lets him skip ads. How else would we get to him?" Other targeted strategies include tapping into what Google calls the "Zero Moment of Truth," when people are searching, often at the last moment and often on their mobile devices, for the information they need to make their decision. "You look at an iPhone 4S, and the next thing is going to be Siri optimization," says Moffatt. "When someone talks to their phone, how do you make sure your stuff comes up first?" The techniques made possible by today's technologies aren't always the easiest of sells, inside the campaign and out. "One of the biggest challenges this cycle is getting people to understand remarketing," as in the use of behavioral ads that trail users as they travel around the web. "People think you're advertising to a page," says Moffatt. "No, I'm advertising to that user. It's a commentary on that person, not that site." "I can't help it if people go to MittRomney.com and then go somewhere else," he says. In some cases, the choice to go third-party is less about meeting people where they're socializing than it is about making the most of what's available. "We'd argue a Republican concept: we're never going to do it better than firms that do it all the time." MittRomney.com makes use of Storify, for example, to embed together tweets, video, photos, and more on Romney's weeks on the trail. "Some people might look and say, hey, only two thousand people engaged with it," says Moffatt, "but our argument is that that's two thousand people who for all intents and purposes are coming into our headquarters." THE TROUBLE WITH SOCIAL But blending the political campaign with even best-in-class social technologies presents its own challenges. Those tools' makers aren't necessarily thinking about information management in the ways that campaigns are. And even when they are, their interests aren't always aligned. "If the data's not writing back," as in, being collected by the campaign, "then what's the point of this stuff? That's a challenge with technical firms," says Moffatt. "They don't always understand why you'd want to write back to the voter file." Moffatt runs through the pros and cons of the social tools. Facebook's ease of use makes it immensely powerful in politics, but the company's priority is collecting data to sell stuff to users according to terms of service entirely up to them; total dependence on the platform is ill-advised. Google+ has enormous potential, but campaigns lack certainty that they can go there to talk politics and ultimately grow their list. "You can spend a lot of time talking to 40 people," he says. Social influence measurer Klout is neat, especially if you could use it to find the 40 people in a state most worth talking to. But at the moment, a necessary

refinement is missing. "Are they even primary-voting Republicans?," raises Moffatt. "You don't know, and that, I think, is the missing link of this cycle." If, in 2012, much of the talk in digital politics is about devolving conversations away from campaign websites to third-party social platforms, it's worth remembering the talk of 2008, and even the 'Howard Dean days' of 2004. Digital politics were said then to promise a devolving of power away from campaigns to voters and volunteers themselves. Doing that successfully from inside a campaign, says Moffatt, is a challenge. He frames it again in terms of information management. Barack Obama was skilled in involving volunteers in myriad ways, says Moffatt. The story of Ron Paul, too, is one of often self-directed supporters. "Getting all that siloed data to write back," says Moffatt, "is the hardest part." Of course, there's still a fear factor. "These enterprises are relatively risk-averse by nature," says Moffatt, and the one-headline-and-an-embarrassing-picture news coverage isn't helping much. "You kinda have to sit down with the team on day one and set the ground rules, and say, 'Listen, we're going to have some good stories and we're going to have some rough ones.'" Another remembrance from 2008: that cycle's obsession over list size, especially the idea that Barack Obama's 13-million-member email list that was said to give him a historic power to shape the course of the universe. That, arguably, hasn't exactly panned out. Is it still right to obsess? "You'd be crazy not to," says Moffatt. But he offers caveats. First, it's about digital audiences, not just list sizes. And second, when it comes to audience, we're often counting the wrong things. Case in point, says Moffatt, a recent tweet from Obama's campaign manager. "Stats that matter," zinged Jim Messina, "we've gained more twitter followers in the past three weeks than @mittromney has total." Messina's right on the numbers, says Moffatt. At the moment, Obama has a whopping 12 million Twitter followers, and Romney only a little more than a quarter of a million. But he's off on the 'mattering' bit. "It's funny," says Moffatt. "When we put out a tweet, we have 500 retweets. When they put out out a tweet, they have 1000. Their engagement is only two-to-one to ours? That would seem to show a fundamental weakness in their argument." Judging retweet advantage from the cheap seats is tricky; Twitter doesn't make that data easily understandable. But Moffatt shores up the argument with Facebook. At 25 million fans, Obama has an 18-to-1 Facebook advantage over Romney. But according to Facebook's "People Are Talking About This" metric , rolled out in October, the president only has two and a half times the number of people engaging with this Facebook presence. Could being President of the United States be inflating Obama's social media standing without conveying anywhere close to the equivalent amount of actual interest and excitement? "That's the sort of stuff that would be making me nervous," says Moffatt. Of course, that's what Mitt Romney's digital director would say. But the truth is that one of the glossed-over realities of the digital politics space is that reporting on its substance can be quite difficult. (I know, you feel tremendously badly for me.) Data can be difficult to come by. Much of what happens is, by design, targeted and thus obscured. And so instead we fixate on purported feats of technological genius, shiny ad buys, and raw numbers. NO INTERNET STRATEGY IS AN ISLAND "We talk a lot about motion vs. movement," says Moffatt. "I can do a lot of things to make people think I'm doing a lot of things, but is it worth it?" It gets press, but not all of it good or useful. Moffatt raises #fitn, as in the "First in the Nation" hashtag. "Of course we have conversations about how to leverage a hashtag. But it's conversations about how to leverage a hashtag to get someone to take an action in New Hampshire. Now, with Twitter, maybe you can't geo-locate a tweet to the degree that you would like to. But with Facebook, we probably had [during the New Hampshire primary] 30 different posts targeted to a five miles

radius," including event invitations and other encouragements to do something to benefit Romney that are only ever seen by those in that geographic sweet spot. "People look at websites," says Moffatt, "and say, 'They all do the same things.' But I know that our Florida state page is broken down into 67 different counties and that I don't see that level of granularity being put in by other campaigns," he goes on. "It's easy for Politico to get a third-party source to say, 'This person has more friends than that person, so they must be winning.'" He goes on. "The way that the data is writing in, automating the process for your field staff so that they don't have to log in -- that's the nuts and bolts that a reporter won't ever see. But, to us, that has all the value in the world." The worst digital strategy, suggests Moffatt, is one that exists in a vacuum. During our conversation, I raise a point made by the New York Times' Nate Silver and Micah Cohen in their recent reporting on New Hampshire . No Republican, Romney included, had more than two field offices in the state this cycle, yet in 2008, Obama and Clinton each had 16 there. Money might be a factor; at this point in their respective cycles, the Democrats had far outraised even Romney. And, come general election, the GOP leans a bit on their party infrastructure for their ground game. But Moffatt suggests that all isn't what it appears from on the ground. "When you looked at Iowa, it didn't look like there were a lot of people," he says. "But we were making tens of thousands of phone calls through our phone-from-home program into the state from across the country. The parameters have changed." That said, there's no ignoring that digital and field are inextricably linked. Once built, technology tends to be easy to scale, says Moffatt. "But the hardest part is who on the ground do you turn people to? The real story of the Obama campaign in '08 is that they had more people in Florida than we [Republicans] had in the whole country. You're driving action, but you can only drive people someplace if there's someone there to catch them. It's a question that every campaign has to ask. If you ask someone for their opinion, you'd better be prepared to be respond. I'd rather not ask and not let them down, than ask for it and then leave them hanging. He gets in a gentle dig at Obama. "Sure, there's head count. But I bet they had more bodies on the ground in New Hampshire than we did, and he only got 82 percent of the vote and wasn't running against anyone." Still, Moffatt admits that he keeps an eye on what the Obama 2012 campaign is up to. And the decisions being made in Chicago and in Boston's North End are adding the small but growing body of practical knowledge about how you use the Internet to get very close to becoming President of the United States. "Everyone telling us what we should be doing has never run it," says Moffatt. "There's only one other person in the country that's really having the same experience I am, and they're at the Obama campaign. There aren't many peers." POLITICO: The 2012 Tech Primary http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71461.html Kim Hart January 16, 2012 As GOP presidential contenders stump for votes from Iowa to New Hampshire to South Carolina, Google, Facebook and Twitter are in a race of their own for millions of dollars in political ads. The tech giants are offering candidates new ways to advertise Mitt Romney has spots on YouTube and Rick Perrys Facebook ads target Christian college kids in South Carolina and hiring political consultants, sponsoring debates and poaching from each others ad sales teams to jockey for the top spot in political social media circles.

This is the Twitter election, boasted Peter Greenberger, who Twitter recently lured away from Google, where he started the search giants political ad sales team in 2007. Well be a core component. Not so fast, says Google, the most experienced Web company when it comes to political advertising. Google has expanded its team to work directly with campaigns to come up with ad strategies and every Republican presidential candidate has already bought in, and several have also bought newly refined YouTube ads that target viewers in specific states or cities. What we saw in Iowa and New Hampshire was campaigns using search ads to recruit volunteers and get out the vote, said Rob Saliterman, who heads Googles political ad sales on the Republican side. Theyre reaching people at the exact moment where someone has expressed interest in the campaign. In 2008 and 2010, candidates largely used Google ads to fundraise. Now, in a sign of new sophistication, candidates are using the ads to persuade voters. For example, theyve begun to run search ads on each others names. In Iowa, a Google search for Rick Santorum would bring up a critical ad paid for by Perrys campaign. When New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie endorsed Romney, his campaign bought ads to pop up when voters searched for Christie. Google also owns YouTube, the Webs biggest online video network, where candidates frequently post short ad spots and commercials. New for this election, YouTube offers a TrueView feature that tracks how long viewers watch a video ad, so campaigns only pay when a viewer watches most of the ad. Then theres Facebook, which also has practice when it comes to working with politicians, though its user base was smaller for previous elections. The social networking behemoth allows campaigns to target voters of a specific demographic with specific interests because users volunteer their personal information. In Iowa, for example, Perrys campaign marketed his faith-focused commercials to Iowans who identified themselves as Christians on Facebook. The campaign also made sure a spot featuring his wife, Anita Perry, was prominent on the pages of conservative women in the state. Last week, Perrys campaign launched a new ad targeting students at Furman University, a Baptist college in South Carolina, according to Vincent Harris of Harris Media, who manages Perrys digital strategy. Twitter, already central to the national political conversation, is a newcomer to the political ad arena. In September, it launched its first political product aiming to get a cut of the lucrative 2012 ad spend. A candidate can buy a promoted tweet, which will appear when a certain term is searched for as well as in the timelines of campaign followers, and have a small logo and disclaimer. Twitter also offers a promoted account to help boost the number of followers and a promoted trend, which will put a campaign ad atop popular lists of trending topics. The tech contest to be the wired candidates answer to the TV buy has caught the attention of campaign strategists. Theyre each trying to have the value add of being the fastest-moving vertical, said Zac Moffatt, digital strategist for the Romney campaign. When I started doing this three years ago, Google had two people, Facebook had no one and Twitter didnt have advertising at all. Now Im watching them all expand.

Television ads will continue to attract the bulk of campaign advertising spending in 2012, strategists say. But they predict social media will play a larger role this year in both national and state contests because growing numbers of voters are getting their news online rather than from TV. In the 2010 elections, 73 percent of adult Internet users went online to get information about the elections or to get involved in a campaign, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. While its not the first election cycle in which campaigns have tried to engage voters online, it will be a seismic shift in terms of the amount of budgets these mediums are getting, said Josh Koster, Managing Partner of Chong + Koster, a digital media firm. Google and Facebook will probably get larger pieces of the budget pie, he said, since Twitter has a more limited number of ad products. To capitalize on their growing political roles, the companies are also trying to increase their visibility on the campaign trail. Google and Facebook have already sponsored GOP debates, and Google is sponsoring media hangouts at the primary caucuses. Not everyone thinks Google, Facebook and Twitter need to compete to attract campaigns. They all have large audiences, so its in the best interest of the campaigns to be on all the platforms, said Alan Rosenblatt, associate director of online advocacy for the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. Is there a competition between ABC and NBC to get political ads? I dont think so. Theyre all going to get political ads. Thats not stopping the companies from hiring top digital and political strategists to drive their efforts. Saliterman, who held several communications jobs in the George W. Bush administration, joined Google in September to leverage his contacts with Republicans. Andrew Roos, former Democratic campaign manager, handles sales to Democrats, and a new hire, Sean Harrison, is in charge of selling ads to super PACs and independent-expenditure groups. To get ready for 2012, Facebook hired Katie Harbath, former chief digital strategist for the National Republican Senatorial Committee who also worked on Rudy Giulianis presidential campaign and the Republican National Committee, to reach out to Republican candidates. Adam Conner, a longtime Facebook staffer in D.C., handles relationships with Democrats. In addition to Greenberger, Twitter hired Mindy Finn, one of the Republican Partys top digital strategists and founder of consulting firm EngageDC. One of Twitters big advantages: Its users are ultra-engaged in politics. A candidate can buy a promoted tweet, which will appear when a certain term is searched for as well as in the timelines of campaign followers, and have a small logo and disclaimer. Twitter also offers a promoted account to help boost the number of followers and a promoted trend, which will put a campaign ad atop popular lists of trending topics. The tech contest to be the wired candidates answer to the TV buy has caught the attention of campaign strategists. Theyre each trying to have the value add of being the fastest-moving vertical, said Zac Moffatt, digital strategist for the Romney campaign.

When I started doing this three years ago, Google had two people, Facebook had no one and Twitter didnt have advertising at all. Now Im watching them all expand. Television ads will continue to attract the bulk of campaign advertising spending in 2012, strategists say. But they predict social media will play a larger role this year in both national and state contests because growing numbers of voters are getting their news online rather than from TV. In the 2010 elections, 73 percent of adult Internet users went online to get information about the elections or to get involved in a campaign, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. While its not the first election cycle in which campaigns have tried to engage voters online, it will be a seismic shift in terms of the amount of budgets these mediums are getting, said Josh Koster, Managing Partner of Chong + Koster, a digital media firm. Google and Facebook will probably get larger pieces of the budget pie, he said, since Twitter has a more limited number of ad products. To capitalize on their growing political roles, the companies are also trying to increase their visibility on the campaign trail. Google and Facebook have already sponsored GOP debates, and Google is sponsoring media hangouts at the primary caucuses. Not everyone thinks Google, Facebook and Twitter need to compete to attract campaigns. They all have large audiences, so its in the best interest of the campaigns to be on all the platforms, said Alan Rosenblatt, associate director of online advocacy for the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank. Is there a competition between ABC and NBC to get political ads? I dont think so. Theyre all going to get political ads. Thats not stopping the companies from hiring top digital and political strategists to drive their efforts. Saliterman, who held several communications jobs in the George W. Bush administration, joined Google in September to leverage his contacts with Republicans. Andrew Roos, former Democratic campaign manager, handles sales to Democrats, and a new hire, Sean Harrison, is in charge of selling ads to super PACs and independent-expenditure groups. To get ready for 2012, Facebook hired Katie Harbath, former chief digital strategist for the National Republican Senatorial Committee who also worked on Rudy Giulianis presidential campaign and the Republican National Committee, to reach out to Republican candidates. Adam Conner, a longtime Facebook staffer in D.C., handles relationships with Democrats. In addition to Greenberger, Twitter hired Mindy Finn, one of the Republican Partys top digital strategists and founder of consulting firm EngageDC. One of Twitters big advantages: Its users are ultra-engaged in politics. Slate: Project Dreamcatcher http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/victory_lab/2012/01/project_dreamcatcher_how_cutting _edge_text_analytics_can_help_the_obama_campaign_determine_voters_hopes_and_fears_.html By Sasha Issenberg January 13, 2012

Share your story, Barack Obamas Pennsylvania website encouraged voters just before the holidays, above a text field roomy enough for even one of the presidents own discursive answers. Tell us why you want to be involved in this campaign, read the instructions. How has the work President Obama has done benefited you? Why are you once again standing for change? In Obamas world, this is almost a tic. His transition committee solicited *a+n American moment: your story on the occasion of his inauguration. The Democratic National Committee later asked people to *s+hare your story about the economic crisis. Its easy to see where this approach fits into the culture of Obamas politicking: His own career is founded on the value of personal narratives and much of his field staff takes inspiration from Marshall Ganz, the former labor tactician who famously built solidarity in his organizing sessions by asking participants to talk about their backgrounds. But might a presidential campaign have another use for tens of thousands of minimemoirs? Thats the central thrust of a project under way in Chicago known by the code name Dreamcatcher and led by Rayid Ghani, the man who has been named Obamas chief scientist. Veterans of the 2008 campaign snicker at the new set of job titles, like Ghanis, which have been conjured to describe roles on the reelection staff, suggesting that they sound better suited to corporate life than a political operation priding itself on a grassroots sensibility. Indeed, Ghani last held the chief-scientist title at Accenture Technology Labs, just across the Chicago River from Obamas headquarters. It was there that he developed the expertise Obamas campaign hopes can help them turn feel-good projects like share your story into a source of valuable data for sorting through the electorate. At Accenture, Ghani mined the mountains of private data that collect on corporate consumer servers to find statistical patterns that could forecast the future. In one case, he developed a system to replace health insurers random audits by deploying an algorithm able to anticipate which of 50,000 daily claims are most likely to require individual attention. (Up to 30 percent of an insurers resources can be devoted to reprocessing claims.) To help set the terms of price insurance marketed to eBay sellers, Ghani developed a model to estimate the end-price for auctions, based on each sale items unique characteristics. Often, Ghani found himself trying to help businesses find patterns in consumer behavior so that his clients could develop different strategies for different individuals. (In the corporate world, this is known as CRM, for customer-relationship management.) To help grocery stores design personalized sale promotions that would maximize total revenue, Ghani needed to understand how shoppers interacted with different products in relation to one another. The typical store had 60,000 products on its shelves, and Ghani coded each into one of 551 categories (like dog food, laundry detergent, orange juice) that allowed him to develop statistical models of how people build a shopping list and manage their baskets. Ghanis algorithms assigned shoppers scores to rate their individual propensities for particular behaviors, like the opportunistic index (how savvy the customer is about getting better prices than the rest of the population), and to see whether they had distinctive habits (like pantry-loading) when faced with a price drop. If there was a two-for-one deal on a certain brand of orange juice, Ghanis models could predict who would double their purchase, who would keep buying the same amount, and who would switch from grapefruit for the week. But Ghani realized that customers didnt see the supermarket as a collection of 551 product categories, or even 60,000 unique items. He points to the example of a 1-liter plastic jug of Tropicana Low Pulp Vitamin-D Fortified Orange Juice. To capture how that juice actually interacted with other products in a shoppers basket, Ghani knew the product needed to be seen more as just an item in the orange juice category. So he reduced it to a series of attributesBrand: Tropicana, Pulp: low, Fortified with: Vitamin-D, Size: 1 liter, Bottle

type: plastic that could be weighed by the algorithms. Now a retailers models could get closer to calculating shopping decisions as customers actually made them. A sale on low-pulp Tropicana might lure people who usually purchased a pulpier juice, but would Floridas Natural drinkers shift to a rival brand? Would a two-for-one deal get those who typically looked for their juice in a carton to stock up on plastic? The challenge was, in essence, semantic: teaching computers to decode complex product descriptions and isolate their essential attributes. For another client, Ghani, along with four Accenture colleagues and a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist, used a Web crawler to pull product names and descriptions from online clothes stores and built an algorithm that could assess products based on eight different attributes, including age group, formality, price point, and degree of sportiness. Once the products had been assigned values in each of those categories, they could be manipulated numericallythe same way that Ghanis predictive models had tried to make sense of the grocery shopping list. By reducing it to its basic attributes lightweight mesh nylon material, low profile sole, standard lacing systema retailer could predict sales for shoes it had never sold before by comparing them to ones it had. Ghanis clients in the corporate world were companies that analyze large amounts of transactional data but are unable to systematically understand their products, as his team wrote. Political campaigns struggle with much the same problem. In 2008, Obamas campaign successfully hoarded hard data available from large commercial databases, voter files, boutique lists, and an unprecedented quantity of voter interviews it regularly conducted using paid phone banks and volunteer canvassers. Obamas analysts used the data to build sophisticated statistical models that allowed them to sort voters by their relative likelihoods of supporting Obama (and of voting at all). The algorithms could also be programmed to predict views on particular issues, and Obamas targeters developed a few flags that predicted binary positions on discrete, sensitive topicslike whether someone was likely pro-choice or pro-life. But the algorithms the Obama campaign used in 2008and that Mitt Romney has used so far this year have trouble picking up voter positions, or the intensity around those positions, with much nuance. In other words, the analysts were getting pretty good at sorting the orange juice drinkers from the grapefruit juice drinkers. But they still didnt have a great sense of why a given voter preferred grapefruit to O.J.and how to change his mind. Polls seemed unable to get at an honest hierarchy of personal priorities in a way that could help target messages. Before the 2008 Iowa caucuses, every Democrats top concern seemed to be opposition to the Iraq war; once Lehman Bros. collapsed not long after the conventions, the economy became the leading issue across demographic and ideological groups. But microtargeting surveys were unable to burrow beneath that surface unanimity to separate individual differences in attitudes toward the war or the economy. If a voter writes in a Web form that her top concern is the war in Afghanistan, should she should be asked to enlist as a Veterans for Obama volunteer, or sent direct mail written to placate foreign-policy critics? Campaigns do, however, take in plenty of information about what voters believe, information that is not gathered in the form of a poll. It comes in voters own words, often registered onto the clipboards of canvassers, during a call-center phone conversation, in an online signup sequence or a stunt like share your story. As part of the Dreamcatcher project, Obama campaign officials have already set out to redesign the notes field on individual records in the database they use to track voters so that it sits visibly at the top of the screenencouraging volunteers to gather and enter that information. And theyve made the field large enough to include the stories submitted online. (One story was 60,000 text characters long.) What can the campaign do with this blizzard of text snippets? Theoretically, Ghani could isolate keywords and context, then use statistical patterns gleaned from the examples of millions of voters to discern

meaning. Say someone prattles on about the auto bailout to a volunteer canvasser: Is he lauding a signature domestic-policy achievement or is he a Tea Party sympathizer who should be excluded from Obamas future outreach efforts? An algorithm able to interpret that voters actual words and sort them into categories might be able to make an educated guess. Theyre trying to tease out a lot more nuanced inferences about what people care about, says a Democratic consultant who worked closely with Obamas data team in 2008. Obamas campaign has boasted that one of their priorities this year is something theyve described only as microlistening, but would officially not discuss how they intend to deploy insights gleaned from their new research into text analytics. We have no plans to read out our data/analytics/voter contact strategy, spokesman Ben LaBolt writes by email. That just telegraphs to the other guys what we're up to. Yet those familiar with Dreamcatcher describe it as a bet on text analytics to make sense of a whole genre of personal information that no one has ever systematically collected or put to use in politics. Obamas targeters hope the project will allow them to make more sophisticated decisions about which voters to approach and what to say to them. Its not about us trying to leverage the information we have to better predict what people are doing. Its about us being better listeners, says a campaign official. When a million people are talking to you at once its hard to listen to everything, and we need text analytics and other tools to make sense of what everyone is saying in a structured way. POLITICO: Facebook Users Have A Lot to Say on Debates http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71386.html Rachel Van Dongen January 13, 2012 POLITICO has joined forces with Facebook to offer readers an exclusive look at the conversation taking place on the social networking site about the Republican presidential candidates ahead of South Carolinas crucial primary on Jan. 21 Facebook users have strong opinions about presidential debates, according to a Facebook survey of its U.S. users. And they dont always mirror those of voters. On Dec. 16, for instance, Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman shot to the top of the GOP pack in terms of positive sentiment roughly 70 percent of the postings and comments on Facebook about them were positive according to a monthlong survey done exclusively by Facebook and provided to POLITICO. That was the day after the Sioux City, Iowa, Fox News debate, the last before the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses. While the Facebook chatter presaged Santorums surge, users of the social network were more inclined to be supportive of Huntsman than Iowa voters, who gave him just 1 percent in the caucuses. It was also a day when most of the mainstream media covered the debate and judged who won and lost, and could have been when most Facebook users shared and commented on articles, or even watched the latenight debate, or clips of it, for the first time. This is the first time that Facebook has undertaken such a survey of its users about presidential candidates. And the results do not always accurately reflect what happens in the early states. The survey, for instance, is not of registered or likely voters, and includes people from all political parties. It also examines Facebook users nationally, not just those in early states such as Iowa. (See Also: Romney, Paul lead Facebook primary)

But the survey of how popular the GOP contenders are on Facebook is nonetheless revealing. Facebook uses a software tool called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count to search for positive words like love or nice, and negative words like hate and nasty. Facebook surveys its users automatically and does not read any of the posts itself. On Jan. 3, the date of the Iowa caucuses, positive sentiment for all the candidates was actually tanking, reaching a low on Jan. 4, the day after Mitt Romney won, trailed closely by Santorum. Facebook did not measure neutral chatter about the candidates. On Jan. 8, the night after the ABC-WMUR debate, Facebook users had nice things to say about Huntsman, Romney and Newt Gingrich. After the Jan. 9 NBC-Facebook morning debate that followed it, Rick Perry seemed to be the one who spiked. But any of that data could have been influenced by the Jan. 10 New Hampshire primary, in which users were feeling good about Gingrich and Romney on primary day. Romney won, but Gingrich placed fourth. POLITICO: Facebook Primary: Mitt Romney, Ron Paul in the Lead http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71345.html Rachel Van Dongen January 12, 2012 POLITICO has joined forces with Facebook to offer readers an exclusive look at the conversation taking place on the social networking site about the Republican presidential candidates ahead of South Carolinas crucial primary on Jan. 21. If Mitt Romney was worried about a late surge from Rick Santorum toppling him in Tuesdays New Hampshire primary, his fans on Facebook knew better. According to an exclusive survey of all U.S. Facebook users provided to POLITICO by Facebook, the volume of posts, status updates, links shared to friends walls and user comments about Romney in the days leading up to the Granite State primary predicted a strong finish. On Jan. 10, primary day, Romney reached over 100,000 mentions on the social network, about the same number as Ron Paul, who finished second in New Hampshire. Although Paul finished 17 points behind Romney in New Hampshire, his prowess on social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, where he has legions of devoted fans eager to spread his message, is well-known. Though Santorum shot to within eight voters of Romney in the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, he actually saw a significant drop-off in Facebook interest immediately afterward. Santorum reached a high of over 100,000 Facebook mentions, to match Paul, around the 3rd but saw a steady slide in Facebook chatter leading up to New Hampshire. By the time of the primary, far less people were sharing information about him with their Faceboook fans. Santorum ended up placing fifth at the Granite State polls. This is the first time that Facebook, a powerful social-networking utility with 800 million global users, has surveyed its U.S. users around a presidential contest in this way. It not only examined the volume of posting,

sharing and linking about candidates from Dec. 12 through Jan. 10, it also studied the sentiment around such data, or whether the comments being made about a candidate were positive or negative in tone. Facebook does not publicly disclose its number of U.S. users but does say that more people in the U.S. use Facebook than voted in the last U.S. presidential election. To gather the data, Facebook uses an automated process to analyze all posts and comments from U.S. users that mention presidential candidates. To determine whether Facebook users had nice or nasty things to say about the GOP contenders, Facebook employed a tool called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), which it says is a well-validated software tool used frequently in social psychological research to identify positive and negative emotion in text. Facebook employees did not read any user content or posts in doing the survey. Facebook, for instance, used the software to search for words like love, nice and sweet on the positive side about candidates. And on the negative side, it looked for terms like hurt, ugly and nasty. As with any automated system, however, there are quirks, and sometimes positive and negative sentiments were found in the same post about the same candidate. That comment would get counted more than once. But some things stand out from the monthlong data. For example, Newt Gingrich by far received the most consistently negative comments on Facebook for the month examined. The reasons for the trend arent exactly clear, but the data began trickling in shortly after Gingrich surged to the top of the GOP field for a brief period in early December. The moment Gingrich became a real contender to win Iowa, a super PAC financed by Romney supporters began bashing him with a barrage of negative advertisements in the Hawkeye State, the ramifications of which could have worked their way through cyberspace (though Facebook surveyed national users, far beyond the scope of the advertising buy). The national news media also began paying more attention to the former House speaker and the negative ad barrage around the same time. Right around the caucuses, over 50 percent of the Facebook activity around Gingrich was negative. Or maybe Facebook users simply were down on Gingrich at that point in time for other reasons. Negative sentiment for all candidates, including Gingrich, dropped markedly on Jan. 3, the day of the caucuses suggesting the nations first contest might have given all Facebook users a warm feeling about the candidates for just 24 hours. Declaring a winner of the Facebook primary or the candidate viewed most positively over the past month is far more difficult than tallying votes. Santorum didnt see a spike in positive postings on Facebook around his Iowa win, but Gingrich did. Jon Huntsman seems to have been a Facebook favorite, but won less than 1 percent of the vote in Iowa. Romney did well with users around the time of Iowa, and Paul, with his zealous fan base, held pretty much steady. WCSH (Portland): Social Media Throughout the NH Primary http://www.wcsh6.com/news/article/185328/2/Social-media-throughout-the-NH-Primary Brett Whitmarsh 01/10/2012

MANCHESTER, NH (NEWS CENTER) -- As we've been telling you throughout our Primary coverage, this campaign has been a busy one for social media. NEWSCENTER'S Social Media coordinator, Brett Whitmarsh, has been keeping an eye Facebook and Twitter all day, and breaks it down for us. Social media has been an opportunity for passionate fans of each candidate to connect with other voters and campaign for their candidate virtually, but how does that online support play out on the day itself? Well as Jon Hunstman said the other day, you can't win an election with social media alone. Early this morning each candidate posted links to polling places throughout the state and some candidates even invited voters to check-in on Facebook or Four-square when getting to their polling place. Ron Paul for example is offering a service on his Facebook page asking voters to phone a friend essentially. If you've already voted or live out of state, you can sign up to ten people who are eligible to vote in NH to receive a call from Ron Paul. It's basically a pre-recorded message from Ron, but encourages people to vote. Also going into today various organizations have been monitoring the Twitter chatter for each candidate. While Ron Paul always has a big social media presence, Jon Huntsman has had the most Twitter growth in the last couple of days. A blog called "Storyful" studied the tweets from today and showed that Huntsman had the most twitter buzz. Based on the text of Tweets, he had the most mentions. Ironically, a new Public Policy Poll in South Carolina shows comedian Steven Colbert ahead of Huntsman in a new poll that came out today. Huntsman is 2nd to last in that poll though. What is the mood of New Hampshire voters now that the day is starting to wind down?

There was a lot of excitement early this morning as we were live tweeting the Dixville Notch voting process. Since only 9 people voted, that was rather exciting to watch as a community on Twitter. I think too the momentum will pick up tonight as the results are coming in. People will really tweet their true feelings once the polls have closed right now most of what were hearing is just support of each campaign. That being said, some voters are saying how much they are ready for this to be over. I heard from a few independent voters saying that they felt the "robo" calls were a bit excessive than in past years. A lot of people preferred the campaign to stay on social media because they can control the level of how much they get involved with each campaign. One "Facebooker" had this to say: Larry: "All the phone calls are what I disliked most. Politicians should have to abide by the Do Not Call List" I have one comment that sort of sums up some of the folks I'm hearing from: Amanda in Lee, NH from Facebook "So happy that it will be done! I love that NH is the first primary in the country but I'm tired of seeing all of the political ads. Plus it is the only thing that the news focuses on. I'm pretty sure there is more happening in NH right now than a candidate town hall... Super excited for tomorrow! :)" All Facebook: Will Facebook Debate Spur a Huntsman Shakeup in NH? http://allfacebook.com/facebook-huntsman-shakeup_b72968 Jennifer Moire 01/09/2012

Sparks flew at the Facebook/NBC News Meet the Press Republican Candidates debate ahead of Tuesdays New Hampshire primary. But will the drama affect the outcome of Tuesdays New Hampshire primary? The issue before the first primary in the nation is not who will win most polls indicate that will be Mitt Romney. Despite the blows he took at Sundays debate, Romney still has the most Facebook fans of all the GOP candidates at more than 1.2 million, adding nearly 5,000 new Facebook fans in the past day. The bigger question is, who will capture second place? Jon Huntsman appears to be the man with the momentum. Heres a look at where the candidates fighting for second stand using Election Tracker 2012. Jon Huntsman While Huntsman had a strong debate performance Sunday (see his post-debate Facebook message at the end of this post), he hasnt seen that translate to Facebook enthusiasm quite yet. He remains in ninth place among the GOP contenders in Facebook fans, with 33,396. Thats roughly half the fans of his next closest competitor, Rick Santorum, who saw a bump in likes after his Iowa caucus win. In the past seven days, Huntsman has added 2,772 new Facebook fans. At least someone or three in his family have a strong social network presence. Three daughters have taken to Twitter, @Jon2012Girls, to pump up their dads candidacy. Ron Paul Despite two polls Sunday night showing Ron Paul in second place, experts predict his New Hampshire race may be faltering as Huntsman closes in, with Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich on his heels. Paul remains a solid second in total Facebook fans among the contenders with more than 702,329. He added 3,296 fans in just the last day, one of the highest daily totals among all elected officials. Rick Santorum Talk about an Iowa bump! Rick Santorum, the man who came from behind to virtually tie Romney last week, has seen his Facebook fan page growth steady. But not before garnering more than one-third of his total Facebook fans in the days following his improbable caucus showing. Will waning enthusiasm online, and lackluster debate performances, indicate a stall in his campaign? A note about the Facebook debate: The integration of Facebook into the event coverage really worked. NBC News used the last 15 minutes of the debate to ask the candidates questions from the Meet the Press Facebook page, where more than 4,600 comments were shared, and posts were culled from the social network and featured on-screen during the program. (see above.) Readers, do you plan on tracking the results of the New Hampshire primary on Facebook?

Mashable: Facebook, NBC joining forces to host social presidential debate http://mashable.com/2012/01/05/nbc-facebook-debate/ Alex Fitzpatrick January 5, 2012 NBC and Facebook are teaming up to co-host a Republican debate Sunday night with a unique social media component. The debate, moderated by Meet the Press host David Gregory, will air on NBC Sunday, Jan. 8 at 9 a.m. ET, two days before the New Hampshire primary. The debate will also be streaming live on MSNBC.com and on Facebook, allowing political junkies to tune-in online. Users who watch online (or on T.V. while online) will be able to submit questions directly to candidates via a Facebook widget. They will also be able to interact with one another in real-time as part of a comprehensive second screen experience, a setup familiar to many television fans. By allowing people to connect in an authentic and meaningful way with presidential candidates, we hope more voters than ever will get involved with issues that matter most to them. said Elliot Schrage, Vice President of Global Communications, Marketing and Public Policy at Facebook, in a statement. We originally reported on the NBC/Facebook debate in July of last year. Since then, NBC and Facebook have been asking users to share issues they would like to be addressed during the debate. And, as former President Bill Clinton famously said, its the economy, stupid. Facebook Data The Facebook portal isnt constrained to a simple poll. It features a widget for more complex debate where 2,000 comments have been left over the past few months. Users arent just dropping comments and leaving, either. Theyre replying and coming back to answer other users, showing real interaction on the site. This isnt the first time Facebook has been heavily involved with a political debate, but the built-in stream and widgets are a significant evolution in Facebooks involvement with politics. In 2008, Facebook partnered with ABC News and featured Debate Groups, simple spaces where users could discuss the nights events. When President Obama was sworn in to office in 2009, Facebook brought users streaming video via CNN alongside Livestream, an instant chat tool. And during the 2010 midterm elections, Facebook and ABC again teamed up to livestream a town hall broadcast from Arizona State University. Other social media networks are in on the politics game, too. In July of last year, Twitter joined up with the White House for President Obamas first Twitter Town Hall. The president took questions live from Twitter users and answered them via an online stream hosted on the White Houses website. To follow the debate Sunday, tune your TV to NBC or point your browser at MSNBC or Facebook. Then, check out Facebooks politics portal to get involved with the social debate by asking questions for the candidates or by having a conversation with other online users. Are you excited about taking part in the NBC/Facebook debate? Let us know in the comments below. All Facebook: GOP gears up for Sundays NBC News Facebook Debate http://allfacebook.com/facebook-debate-3_b72763 Jennifer Moire

January 5, 2012 The GOP candidates are getting ready to rumble this weekend in New Hampshire at the presidential primary debate streaming on Facebook through a partnership with NBC News Meet the Press presidential primary debate. Set your alarm clocks, because this debate starts Sunday at 9 a.m. Eastern Time, only two days before the nations first primary in the Granite State. The audience can tune in or log on in a number of ways, in what promises to be a spirited debate following the wild finish between Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney in Iowa. Not only will the debate stream live on the Meet the Press Facebook page and Facebooks U.S. Politics page, but viewers can share questions and comment on the action throughout the event. Care to skip the morning alarm? Facebookers can also ask their questions in advance, here. A sampling of recent questions are posted below. The debate will also be available on-demand on the Meet the Press Facebook page and Facebooks U.S. politics page. Facebooks U.S. politics page is offering a look behind-the-scenes in the days leading up to the battle in Concord, New Hampshires Chubb Theater. The Facebook and NBC News debate will be moderated by Meet the Press host David Gregory, who will be joined by the New Hampshire Union Leader. An NBC News/Marist poll of New Hampshire voters due out Friday may give a better indication of whether the man with momentum, Rick Santorum, is catching up to front-runner Mitt Romney after the virtual tie in the Iowa caucus, which should make Sundays action that much more interesting. All Facebook: Economy is Top Concern for Voters on Facebook http://allfacebook.com/poll-economy-remains-top-concern-for-voters-on-facebook_b72499 Jennifer Moire January 3, 2012 The economy tops the list of concerns for voters on Facebook, according to a new study conducted by the social network and NBC News ahead of the pairs Republican Presidential Debate on Meet the Press Sunday, January 8 at 9 a.m. Eastern Time. The social networking site and the news network asked voters on Facebook about the most pressing issues facing the nation in the past month. Facebook users could choose among the following five issues: The economy, the federal budget deficit, health care, illegal immigration and foreign policy. The results were released today, within hours of the start of the Iowa caucus and one week before the nations first primary in New Hampshire. Below is a sampling of the results from Facebook, based on regions.

New Hampshire Economy: 58 percent Federal Budget Deficit: 19 percent Health Care: 11 percent Illegal Immigration: six percent Foreign Policy: five percent Iowa Economy: 57 percent Federal Budget Deficit: 19 percent Health Care: 12 percent Illegal Immigration: eight percent Foreign Policy: four percent Nationally Economy: 56 percent Federal Budget Deficit: five percent Health Care: 12 percent Illegal Immigration: nine percent Foreign Policy: five percent Facebook users have also been sharing questions for the debate and interacting with others interested in the event on the sponsors pages. The debate, moderated by Meet the Press host David Gregory, will stream live on Facebook as part of the multi-platform event. Viewers can tune in to the U.S. politics page on Facebook at at 9 a.m. Eastern Time Sunday to watch the action, post questions or comment during the debate or do the same at this MSNBC page. The debate takes place two days before the New Hampshire primary in the historic Chubb Theater in Concord, NH. Joining the questioning will be The New Hampshire Union Leader, a mainstay of New Hampshire politics. Elliot Schrage, vice president of global communications, marketing and public policy for Facebook, wrote a countdown to the debate on the companys U.S. Politics page. Do you plan to participate in Facebooks interactive stream of the debate on Sunday? Newsmax: From Facebook to Twitter, Candidates Trade Final Jabs on Social Media http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/Facebook-Twitter-Social-Media/2012/01/03/id/422891 Paul Scicchitano January 3, 2012 As GOP presidential candidates try to make a final connection with Iowa voters today, some also are using social media to throw final jabs at their opponents and galvanize supporters.

Rick Santorum is unelectable and we need to defeat Barack Obama, tweeted Texas Gov. Rick Perry, whose campaign released a video critical of Santorums record in the Senate. Perry, who has been trailing in most polls, started caucus day by declaring in a message on his Twitter account that today is Game day and thanking Iowans who are trying to make a difference. Today is the day we conservatives have been waiting for! The eyes of the nation are watching Iowa, and we need your help to ensure a strong showing at the caucuses tonight, Perry said on Facebook. Meanwhile, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the presumed frontrunner in Iowa's caucuses, called his supporters to action and took jabs at President Obama. Iowa can help put an end to @BarackObamas failed leadership. Take action today & join the GOTV from home team, he tweeted. Romney also posted a link to his petition to limit government spending on Facebook. We have a moral responsibility not to spend more than we take in. If you agree, stand with me and sign the petition, he wrote. Santorum, whose campaign has experienced a late surge in recent days, tweeted: Morning Iowa! Today is the day. Participating in Rock the Caucus, Santorum later told an audience of Iowa high school students that their concerns over career and education will be short-term worries. The longer-term problems are the ones that are going to affect you more profoundly, he said. Hold those candidates to the standard of solving the intractable problems of an exploding federal government, of an exploding debt thats going to crush your economic future. Santorum encouraged the students to look for differences in the way the candidates propose to solve such problems. Take a look. There are different ways of solving these problems, he said. Barack Obama has one way and I have another. Look at them. Make sure they are real. Make sure you can see how we can accomplish this vision of getting this economy going, not just in the short-term stimulus but for long-term stable growth so you and your family can live free and prosper in a safe country. Texas Rep. Ron Paul took a swipe at Santorum on his Facebook page. He spends too much money. He wasnt leading the charge to slash the budgets and vote against big government, according to a post today. Paul, who has also been gaining momentum in recent days, appealed to high school students at the same rally where Santorum spoke. You can understand foreign policy. You can understand economic policy if you understand the principle of economic liberty, Paul told the students. The purpose of the Constitution is to restrain the federal government, not to restrain you as an individual. He warned his young audience that there is a danger the federal government will attempt to take away

Internet privacy. Believe me, the Internet is very, very valuable, he explained. If you lose the privacy of the Internet, you have lost a big hunk of your freedom. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who made headlines early in the day by acknowledging in an interview that he believed Romney to be a liar sent multiple tweets attempting to play up his experience in Washington and differentiate himself from rivals, including Romney. "Newt's the only candidate that will balance the federal budget, and he's the smartest guy on the stage," tweeted the Gingrich campaign. Other tweets talked about Gingrichs involvement in passing the largest capital gains tax cut in history and his role in balancing the budget for four straight years. Newt's economic plan is the most aggressive now, and it shows you how timid Romney's is in comparison, the campaign tweeted. Daily Beast: Yes We Can, Cant We? http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/01/inside-president-obama-s-reelectionmachine.html Andrew Romano January 2, 2012 The Obama campaign is not kidding around. I recently visited its headquarters in Chicago, and I can personally vouch for how much its not kidding around. Yes, there was a blue Ping-Pong table in the middle of the officecustom-made, evidently, because the Obama 2012 logo was emblazoned on it. (Twice.) There were printouts of peoples nicknamesSandals! Shermanator!where corporate nameplates usually go. There was a mesh trucker hat from South Dakota, which was blaze orange and said Big Cock Country on the crown. There was a cardboard speech bubble (nom nom data nom) affixed to an Uglydoll. There was miniature air-hockey table. A narwhal mural. A stuffed Rastafarian banana. But do not be deceived. There was also a chaperone following me everywhere I went and digitally recording everything anyone said to me. Ben LaBolt, Obamas press secretary, and Stephanie Cutter, his deputy campaign manager, closed their doors as I walked by. An underling clammed up when I asked what she and her colleagues do on the weekends. At one point my minder agreed to let me out of her sight for a few milliseconds, but then I got too close to a big whiteboard covered in hieroglyphic flow charts and she instantaneously materialized at my side, having somehow teleported the 50 yards from where Id last seen her. Sorry, she said, not sounding sorry at all. You cant look at that. The next day it was covered by a tarp. In short, the place is intense; Obamas minions are very serious about lots of things, including the business of reminding themselves not to be so serious. But then I would be intense, too, if I were the Obama campaign. With 10 months to go before Election Day, the presidents job-approval rating is loitering around 46 percent, which is a problem, because the incumbent party has lost the last five times its president started Election Year below 49 percent. Likewise, no president since Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 has been reelected when the unemployment rate is as high or higher than it is now (8.6 percent), and no president since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956 has won a second term when GDP growth is as slow or slower than the current pace (2 percent). While none of these afflictions is fatal in and of itself, Obama has to overcome all three of them at once. No other modern president has even attempted this daring feat, let alone survived it.

So it makes sense for Chicago to be uptight. The presidents legendarily leakproof operation has splintered, with top advisers talking out of turn for the first time since he was elected (Exhibit A: Ron Suskinds Confidence Men). The halo that hovered over Obamas head back when he was a hopey-changey candidate the halo that lured a vast army of political neophytes to the pollshas given way, of necessity, to a politicians less celestial aura. And then theres the expectations game to contend with. In 2008, Obama was the underdog. His team didnt have time for anxiety; there was always another fight to focus on, another impossible victory to engineer. But this year, there is only one: Nov. 6. And because the presidency is theirs to lose, Obamas staffers are, understandably, worried about losing it. They know the White House has had trouble selling what they see as Obamas impressive recordand now the burden falls on them. There are going to be some white-knuckle moments, one 2008 veteran told me. Its going to be really hard. The good news for Obama is that it may be harder for Republicans. While the GOP candidates have spent the last year parading and pirouetting on Fox News, the presidents team has been quietly, methodically channeling their worry back into the campaignand creating something, I discovered in Chicago, that will be even bigger, even smarter, and even more surprising than their revolutionary 2008 operation. Before my chaperone apprehended me near the whiteboard, I noticed a photograph taped to a developers Mac. Everyone chill the fuck out, it said. I got this. I knew the line; it had first appeared on a JPEG of Obama, scowling and resolute, that went viral in September 2008, during one of the Democratic Partys inveterate panic attacks. But the president wasnt in this particular picture. In his place was the operative in charge of getting him reelected: campaign manager Jim Messina. No doubt it was a comforting mantra for the developer, and for the rest of the twitchy Chicago crew: chilled-the-fuck-out-or-not, Messinas got this. Who knows? It may even turn out to be true. Unlike his celebrated predecessor, David Plouffe, a boyish, buzz-cut operative who smiled inexplicably after every sentence, the rangy Messina, 42, rarely permits his features, which include a pair of rather prominent, purplish lips, to form any particular expression; he tends to roam the office blank-faced, his shoulders slumped forward and his head cocked at an inquisitive angle. At the start of our interview, Messina, a proud Montanan who spent two years as Obamas top Capitol Hill fixer before taking over the campaign, seemed to delight in answering my questions as curtly as possible, as if to say, I will give you what I want to give you, and not a syllable more. But he has something to prove, too. In Washington, Democrats wonder whether Messina can make the leap from trusted No. 2, as Politico recently noted, and there have even been skeptics in the West Wing, where the 2008 veterans joked, at least initially, that the 2012 roster represented a B Team of sorts, according to a source familiar with the White Houses inner workings. All of which is just to say: it didnt take long for Messina to start crowing about the intricate machine hes managed to assemble, 700 miles away from the Beltway big top. The presidents greatest advantage, Messina explained, is time. Without a primary war to wage, his staff has been able to dedicate the past 10 months exclusively to general-election preparationsa head start not only over 2008 (and previous incumbents) but over a bumper crop of clumsy Republicans who have been too distracted by 2011s 13 televised debates to bother with old-fashioned chores such as fundraising or field organizing. We now have people on the ground all across the country whove spent four years, five years in our system and know how to do this, who believe in this guy, and who are trained, Messina told me. Thats just a huge piece of business. *Mitt+ Romney and *Newt+ Gingrich dont have operations on the ground in these states. Consider the numbers. In January 2004, George W. Bushs aides bragged that theyd held a grand total of 52 training sessions around the country for precinct leaders. The Obama campaign, by comparison, held 57 ... in

a single December week ... in a single state, Iowa. Right now, there are more than 200 paid staffers working in Chicagodouble Bushs head count at the beginning of 2004, and more than double Romneys current total. (Bill Clinton employed only 40 people at this point; the first President Bush was still stuck in the single digits.) Messina has already hired an in-house design crew, an in-house gear team, and in-house tech developers, who are tinkering away on a top-secret application that will track every conversation that every single Obama volunteer has, every door they knock on, every action they take. (More on that later.) As one returning staffer put it, This is what we looked like toward the end of the 2008 primary season, in June. Not at the beginning. Meanwhile, Obamas fundraising brigade hit the million-donor mark in six months flat, or twice as fast as last time around, with nearly half of the campaigns cash now coming from donors giving less than $200a much higher percentage than in 2008. Even the corner-office crowd is sticking with the president, at least for the moment: together with the Democratic Nation-al Committee, Obama raised $15.6 million from financialsector workers through September, more than the entire Republican field. All told, Chicago and the DNC have raked in an estimated $190 million to $200 million to date, which is roughly quadruple Romneys projected 2011 haul, and analysts expect the campaign could reach $1 billion by November. Money and manpower, however, are only as good as the message they help to convey. When I asked Obamas top lieutenants about his image problemhow he manages to get caricatured as both a cryptoMarxist radical and an unprincipled, professorial pushover, all at the same timethey responded, almost reflexively, with the usual excuses: we inherited a terrible economy, and, anyway, we really have passed a lot of legislation. But while that analysis is basically accurate, as Beltway scorekeeping goes, its hardly the kind of rallying cry required to remobilize millennials and independents, key constituencies among whom Obamas support has plummeted more than a dozen percentage points since 2008. And so Chicago is crafting a new, more combative message. I speak as one who has responsibilities in this regard, so I take a good deal of the blame, David Axelrod, Obamas chief political strategist, confessed. We took a guy who speaks about vision and values in as compelling a way as anyone of this generation, and we made him into a narrator of the day-to-day decision making of government. The plan for 2012, according to Axelrod, is to tout the presidents achievements while also recognizing that people are less interested in a tote sheet of what has been accomplished than in how we, and alternatively how the other side, would approach the larger economic challenges facing the middle class. Translation: voters should expect (1) more talk about the future than the painful recent past, and (2) a merciless populist assault on the Republican nominees alleged belief in trickle-down social Darwinisman every man for himself ideology designed, according to Axelrod, to ensure that whoever starts with the advantages will likely multiply them, while everybody else pedals faster and faster just to keep up. Think No We Shouldnt (elect a Republican) instead of Yes We Can. Youre looking at a lot more competitive situation, and thats what were preparing for, Axelrod admits. Its going to be a very vigorous debate. The campaign recognizes, of course, that its new tone is unlikely to inspire the sort of dreamy fervor that first swept Obama into office. Asked about Occupy Wall Street, for example, a prominent Democrat familiar with Chicagos thinking said he hope*s+ those folks are keyed in to the debate, because it would be a really profound mistake to assume these problems will be solved somehow outside the political system. But keying them in (along with the rest of the 2008 coalition) wont be easy. Which means that the unglamorous, behind-the-scenes grind of maximizing turnout and persuading voters to support the president, both online and off, will be even more important than it was four years ago. Messina says hes ready. Our efforts on the ground and on technology, he promised me, will make 2008 look prehistoric.

From what I saw in Chicago, Messina is right to boast. In a dark, distant corner of the office, a team of more than a dozen developers sat on big, bouncy yoga balls, tapping away on the customized black keyboards they brought from home. Many of them had unusual facial hair, or unusual piercings, or both, which may be why I heard someone refer to them as those guys who look like theyre Occupying the office. Nonetheless, the developers were very much welcome at One Prudential Plaza. For months now, they have been figuring out how to rewrite the campaigns codecreated when the iPhone was a novelty, when Twitter barely existed, and when Facebook was one tenth its current sizefor this years digital landscape. And theyve come to some interesting conclusions. The first is that the campaign can do a much better job of treating people like people, according to Michael Slaby, Obamas chief integration and innovation officerprovided it harvests the right data. Dont ask a disenchanted Ohioan for money; woo him first. Dont reach out to a supporter who donates $5 during the State of the Union the same way youd reach out to a supporter who donates $5 during a Republican debate; they respond to different incentives. To figure out who each of us is, and what each of us wants, Slaby and his team are constructing a microlistening and computer modeling program that will comb online and offline behavior patterns for voter information, then use it to personalize every interaction we have with the campaign: fundraising, volunteering, persuasion, mobilization. The voters we need to reach and the donors that were trying to raise money from and the supporters and volunteers were trying to activatetheyre all the same group of people, Slaby told me. And for us to communicate with them in an integrated and intelligent way, where all of those things get met and we listen effectively, it requires us to evolve. In 2012 the Obama campaign wont send its backers a video and say, Share this with everyone you know; it will say, Share this with your four Facebook friends in Pennsylvanias crucial Lehigh Valley swing district who are worried about the presidents tax policies. Slabys second insight is that Obamas online and field operations need to be far more integrated than they were in 2008. Back then, the campaign encouraged supporters to create profiles on a social networking site called MyBarackObama.com. But while MyBO was advanced for the times, it was also weirdly detached from the actual field structureand from Facebook, which has since become the worlds default social network. So for 2012 Slaby decided to ditch the site and start from scratch. The campaign still isnt ready to unveil its MyBO replacement, but I managed to collect a couple of clues during my visit to Chicago. Were not building a social network, one insider told me. You dont need to create an account. You dont need to upload a photo. Instead, by logging in with their Facebook ID, volunteers get immediate access to any tool that you can get in a field office. You can have that at home, on your computer, in real time, in a way that connects to what your friends are doing and what the people around you are doing. The campaign, meanwhile, gets immediate access to your Facebook network, plus whatever information you choose to enter about the voters you eventually contact. This way, the insider explained, we can say, Call your friend of a friend who is a lot more likely to be persuaded if you talk to them than if an anonymous volunteer were to call instead. The final piece of the tech puzzle is smartphones. In 2008 the campaigns focused on SMS because texting was the most sophisticated thing most voters could do with their phones; now, almost every mobile device can surf the Web, play and share video, and connect to Twitter and Facebook. If my mom, whos 62, is working off a smartphone and is a supporter of the president, then thats huge, Slaby told me. People can now make calls, canvass, and be engaged on a deeper level from wherever they are. Last November, the campaign redesigned its website so that it would look and work the same on every platform: PC, mobile, tablet. The motivation wasnt merely aesthetic; a site that renders properly on a smartphone makes it easier for volunteers to register new voters and call undecideds on the go, and that kind of efficiency translates into

extra votes. Or so Chicago hopes. As Slaby put it: The 08 campaign doesnt win 2012. We should learn what we can from last time, and be smart about things that worked then still working now. But its a new world. The offline operation is just as cutting-edge. Messinas plan is not to go after every state Obama carried in 2008; instead he will be content to recapture the 251 electoral votes that John Kerry won in 2004 and build from there. He sees five paths to 270, several of which hinge on the president increasing his margins among Latinos, the fastest-growing subset of the electorate. One of the defining issues of the Republican primary has been the complete race to demagogue immigrants, and there will be a price to pay politically for that kind of rhetoric, Messina told me. The Latino vote will be absolutely crucial in this election. The West Path would add Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada to the Kerry states, for 272 electoral votes. The Florida Path would add just Florida, for 275. The South Path runs through North Carolina and Virginia (274 electoral votes), while the Midwest Path includes Ohio and Iowa (270 electoral votes). Finally, theres the Expansion Path: Obama carries all the Kerry states except blue-collar Pennsylvania and libertarian New Hampshire, then compensates with victories in Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and John McCains home state of Arizona, which was uncontested in 2008, for obvious reasons. Messinas Five Paths spiel may seem like straightforward spin: the president cant be in trouble; just look how many options he has! But when I met with Jeremy Bird, Obamas wonky national field director, he made it clear that Chicago isnt just speculating about these routestheyre actively testing the waters, and have been for a while. In Iowa, for example, Bird & Co. are preparing for the Democratic caucuses as if they were contested. Their first paid staff members arrived in Des Moines nearly two years ago, and now Obamas Iowa operationeight offices, a dozen staffers, hundreds of volunteers, 1,280 official events, 4,000 one-on-one conversations, and 350,000 calls to supporterslikely surpasses that of any Republican running. Birds plan is to treat Caucus Night like a massive statewide organizing session, training *caucusgoers+ for what we have to do and giving them specific goals, because the general election will kick off that night. A week later, Obama volunteers from Massachusetts will flow across the border into New Hampshire, practicing for next November. The primaries and caucuses allow us to test our systems, Bird explained. Do we have carsharing systems online so that people can car-pool? Do we have people from Springfield, Mass., going into Nashua [N.H.] always, so they get to know the organizers, so they get to know the turf theyre walking, so they get to know the people theyre talking to? Its just a big opportunity. The opportunities arent limited to the early primary states, either. In North Carolina, Obama staffers and volunteers used last years mayoral race in Charlotte, which will host the 2012 Democratic convention, as a dry run for the general, road-testing their voter-registration and turnout tactics with an actual election coming up, so there were deadlines and people were focused the way they will be next year, according to Bird. By Election Day, supporters of Anthony Foxx, the Democratic incumbent, had made more than 200,000 phone calls10 times his challengers tally. Foxx wound up winning by 35 percentage points. Meanwhile, similar operations are already underway in more than a dozen key swing states, including Ohio, where volunteers teamed up with labor groups last November to sink Gov. John Kasichs ban on collective bargaining, and Arizona, where the campaign has already opened three offices and recruited a Latino candidate for Senate. As one Republican strategist from Raleigh, N.C., recently told The New York Times: This is real. Ive seen it. Im coming off the front linesit aint fun and we better be ready. Two weeks after I left the Windy City, I called Axelrod and asked what worried him most about 2012. The contours of the contest were already clearer than theyd been in Chicago. Obama had just delivered his much-ballyhooed speech in Osawatomie, Kan., blending the populist notes hed recently been sounding on taxes, regulation, and middle-class boosterism into a coherent, campaignlike appeal. This country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, and when everyone plays by the same

rules, hed said. Gingrich had just started to slide in the polls; Romney was just about to become the frontrunner (again). Between now and November, things will happen, the implications of which cant be known, Axelrod answered. Thats something you have to live with during those sleepless nights. Out in Chicago, an army of brilliant worrywarts is slaving away to ensure that Obama wont lose the 2012 election because of organization or technologyand thanks to them he probably wont. But no one really knows if Chicagos meticulous planning will be enough to protect the president from defeat. Not Axelrod. Not Messina. Not this year. If Romney secures the Republican nomination, reelection will be far more difficult than if, say, Gingrich were to prevail; Romney tends to tie Obama, or come close, in head-to-head polls. If the presidents support among Hispanics, which has slipped several points since 2008, doesnt bounce back, then several of Messinas Five Paths may turn out to be dead ends. If Obamas new middleclass message doesnt resuscitate his approval ratings, which are lower than his disapproval ratings (and have been for months), then independents may side with the GOP. And so on. No wonder Team Obama is so controlling: the more you cant control, the more you control what little you can. As I was talking to Axelrod, I remembered something Id seen a few weeks earlier at an Obama rally in Scranton, Pa. Outside the high-school gymnasium, a phalanx of local Tea Partiers was holding signs and shouting about a president who hates America and a first lady who wants to take your kids away because theyre fat. Inside, Obama had just ambled into view, loose-limbed and grinning, to the predictable peal of pubescent delight. This is all online; you can go watch it. But it isnt as strange as it was in person. Heres what happened, at least from my vantage point: one moment, Obama was there, in his white shirtsleeves, shaking Scrantons hands across a steel barricade. And then he was gone. The presidents disappearance was brief; by the time the Secret Service agents lunged forward, he had already escaped his captor, who turned out to be a particularly demonstrative fan. Still, for that split second, in the Scranton gymnasium, with all the rage outside, I wasnt sure what was happening. Is the crowd embracing Obama again? I wondered, or is it swallowing him up? Mashable: Republican Candidates Take to the Web in the Battle for Iowa http://mashable.com/2012/01/01/republican-digital-strategies/ Alex Fitzpatrick January 1, 2012 Republican presidential hopefuls are turning to the web and social media as weapons in the war to win Iowa. On Jan. 3, Iowa Republican caucus-goers will pick their choice for presidential nominee. One of the seven remaining candidates will move a step closer to becoming the GOPs choice to run against President Barack Obama in 2012. What online strategies are each of the candidates using to ensure that Iowa votes their way? Mitt Romney Mitt Romneys digital team has been hard at work in the Hawkeye State. They released a YouTube video explaining the caucus, a process known to cause confusion for first-timers. Romney is using Storify to share information about campaign stops and post behind-the-scenes pictures as he tours Iowa. The campaign is using popular services like FourSquare and Tout to engage supporters. Zac Moffatt, Romneys digital director, said that the campaign is using data collected over 6 months to coordinate their geolocation-based digital effort. According to Moffatt, theyre using pre-roll video footage

 short advertisements placed before other video content in an effort to show Iowans how and where to caucus. Moffatt understands how to use social media and digital advertising to generate offline action. The Romney campaign has identified supporters online, and gotten them in the door to volunteer in the real world. Its fine for people to talk about how great social is, said Moffatt, but you have to leverage offline. Ron Paul Ron Paul has a huge online following, and his campaign is seeking to tap into that precious resource. Pauls website, ronpaul2012.com, features a donation drive with the goal of raising $6 million to win in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida and Nevada. The campaign originally called for $4 million, but it upped the ante after surpassing that mark. The widget automatically shows recent donations along with donors names. For those in Iowa, Pauls site provides a number to call to hit the streets and volunteer. Another system allows out-of-state Paul supporters to dial into Iowa to encourage caucus-goers to vote for Paul. Facebook users who like Pauls page have been seeing an abundance of photos and links to live streams of Paul events in Iowa in their news feeds. According to The New York Times, the Paul campaign has been asking its volunteers not to tweet about their activities or share them on any other social networks, presumably for fear of providing other campaigns with sensitive insider info. Rick Santorum Visitors to Rick Santorums website, ricksantorum.com, will find his Iowa Surprise Moneybomb donation page, complete with a countdown to the Iowa caucus. Like Pauls page, the widget also automatically increases and proudly displays the names of donors. It also offers a widget for supporters to embed on their own personal websites and encourages donors to post about their donation on social networks. His featured photos on Facebook are of a recent pheasant hunting trip in Adel, Iowa, a subtle appeal to Iowans. Santorum has been tweeting mentions of the word Iowa more often than other other candidate aside from Michelle Bachmann. Santorums digital team is still being haunted by his Google problem. The first hit when searching for Santorum isnt a campaign website or WikiPedia article. Instead, its a crude joke started by columnist and gay rights activist Dan Savage in response to Santorums controversial comments about homosexuality made in 2003. Santorum asked Google to remove the search result this year, but Google has yet to do so. Newt Gingrich Newt Gingrichs campaign website, newt.org, asks visitors to donate and make calls. Blog posts written about campaigning in Iowa are featured on the main page, and visitors can find more about upcoming Gingrich appearances.

Gingrichs Facebook page offers many unique tabs and widgets. Team 10, a reference to the 10th amendment, is a unique crowdsourcing platform where users vote on which issues Gingrich should bring to the forefront of his campaign. Through these interactive features, Gingrich has built a vibrant online community of fans who interact with each other on his page. However, aside from the prompt for phone calls, blog posts and a few tweets, Newts online strategy doesnt show an obvious Iowa-focused strategy. Rick Perry Rick Perrys website, rickperry.org, also opens with a donation drive and countdown to the Iowa caucus, but no tallying widget or donor shout-outs are to be found. Perrys site offers a unique question to visitors: Do you blog? Bloggers who support Perry are encouraged to add Perry widgets and graphics to their personal site. The site has an Iowa Action Center, where visitors are greeted with a 30-second clip of Perrys travels through the state and a call to action to get involved with the caucus. Theres a Google Map featuring Perrys campaign bus stops, but it isnt easily readable. Perrys Facebook page has an Iowa tab, which shows users a simple I will caucus for Rick Perry! option along with Perrys controversial Strong YouTube video. Twitter is where the Perry campaign has been fighting hardest to win support in Iowa. @TeamRickPerry started #PizzaBomb Thursday, asking supporters to donate slices of pizza to Perrys Iowa Strike Force HQ. Michelle Bachmann Michelle Bachmanns website, michellebachmann.com, is chock-full of information about the Iowa caucus. Visitors can find out how and where to caucus and purchase a caucus kit, featuring campaign swag dedicated to Iowa. Bachmann is on an ambitious tour of all 99 counties in Iowa before the caucus, and shes keeping a blog, posting videos and tweeting prolifically about the tour. Bachmans Facebook fans have been receiving a steady stream of Iowa-related posts and can view a Caucus Countdown tab which lets fans sign up to caucus or volunteer for Bachmann in Iowa. Jon Huntsman Jon Huntsman is choosing largely to ignore Iowa and focus on New Hampshire instead, where a primary is scheduled for Jan. 10. Huntsmans website and social media accounts reflect that decision. His site, jon2012.com, offers a countdown to New Hampshire, which encourages supporters to donate to his efforts there. The Huntsman website is unique in that it also calls on supporters to call in to talk radio shows broadcasting in New Hampshire to spread the Huntsman message. Huntsman is attempting an ongoing Twitter Takeover, which asks supporters to make sure Huntsmans name is mentioned on the micro-blogging service at least 1,000 times each day. The widget on the page isnt moderated, however, so plenty of negative tweets about Huntsman appear on his site.

Will These Efforts Pay Off? Will the candidates online efforts make a major difference during the Iowa caucus on Jan. 3? Well be doing additional coverage featuring social media sentiment analysis, national polling data and caucus results early next week. ClickZ: New Pro-Paul Group Pushes Video Shares and Blue Republican Plan http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/2134700/pro-paul-pushes-video-shares-blue-republican-plan Kate Kaye December 28, 2011 A newly established organization is supporting Ron Paul's presidential bid in Iowa. Endorse Liberty, an independent expenditure group established just days ago, is targeting ads to Iowa Republicans on Facebook. On its face the goal is simple: persuade Iowa Caucus voters to support Paul. However, the effort also serves to educate voters on the best way to support his candidacy in other states. "Watch this video to see why so many people believe Ron Paul will be one of the greatest Presidents in American history," notes an ad seen by conservative and Republican voters in Iowa on Facebook today. The ad links to a lengthy 12 minute video on YouTube featuring a clickable button that allows people to post a message in support of Paul on their Facebook pages. An "Endorse Ron Paul" button displayed at the end of the video enables a video share on Facebook. The video has been viewed around 20,000 times since it was posted December 21, two days after Endorse Liberty was officially established, according to the Federal Election Commission. But that's not all: Once the Paul endorser enables the Facebook share, he is automatically taken to another YouTube video providing detailed instructions of how to best serve the Paul campaign in other caucuses and primaries across the country, in some cases by registering Republican, for instance. That video suggests that "Blue Republicans" could be key to Paul winning the GOP nomination. According to the BlueRepublican.org website, "Blue Republicans are people who have never before thought of joining the Republican party, but are going to do so for one year to ensure that Ron Paul wins the Republican nomination for President in 2012." Rick Perry's and Mitt Romney's campaigns are also combining persuasive messaging on Facebook with voter action through ads targeting Iowa Republicans. In an array of Facebook ads, Perry is pushing a variety of videos, while Romney's camp is promoting an endorsement by the Des Moines Register in some ads. However, both campaigns are also using Facebook ads to encourage Iowans to caucus for them on January 3. Romney's caucus-specific ads link to a page on the campaign site featuring upcoming Iowa events and instructions on how to caucus for the former Massachusetts governor. Perry's camp, however, is putting a new spin on the "donate your status" tactic by asking supporters to dedicate their Facebook timeline cover images to Perry, in addition to the more standard Facebook and Twitter profile image dedications. New York Times: Republicans Shake More Hands Using Social Media http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/29/us/politics/republicans-shake-more-hands-using-social-

media.html?_r=1 Jennifer Preston December 28, 2011 When Iowans search for information on politics on the Web, Mitt Romneys tutorial on how to caucus pops up. Newt Gingrich is using Facebook to recruit volunteers to make calls on his behalf to Iowa and New Hampshire. And Representative Michele Bachmann is creating videos from her bus tour of the 99 counties in Iowa as part of an online get-out-the-vote toolkit for precinct captains to share with friends and family. After using Facebook and Twitter in recent months primarily to broadcast their messages and raise money, the Republican presidential candidates are increasingly turning to social media sites and other online tools to mobilize voters before the Iowa caucuses on Tuesday and in the other hotly contested early-nominating states. There is no more powerful endorsement than the one from someone you know and trust, whether it is a Facebook post or a knock on the door from your neighbor, said Matthew N. Strawn, chairman of the Republican Party of Iowa. With recent polls showing that more than half of likely caucus voters have not made up their minds, Mr. Strawn said people throwing their support behind a candidate on Facebook or Twitter could affect the outcome. That is what could sway an undecided voter, he said. For Mr. Romney, the question is whether his targeted online advertising and social media strategy in Iowa will help make up for his belated decision to compete aggressively there. And, will it be enough to stave off the recent surge in support for Representative Ron Paul of Texas, who has managed to produce both highly enthusiastic supporters online and large crowds at rallies across Iowa? Ron Pauls supporters are intense, and they show up, said Timothy Hagle, a professor of political science at the University of Iowa. A big test for Mr. Paul, however, will be translating his online support into votes since so many of his supporters are college students now home on winter break. In New Hampshire, Mr. Gingrich is relying heavily on social media and online tools to bolster a campaign organization that did not have much of a structure in place until late October. His state director, Andrew Hemingway, is a Tea Party activist from Bristol, N.H., who is well acquainted with leveraging the power of social media platforms, having helped organize the first Tea Party presidential debate on Twitter earlier this year. One of his first moves was creating the Web site NewtHampshire.com and New Hampshire-specific Twitter and Facebook accounts, where he and other campaign leaders engage regularly with supporters. Just like you would have county captains or city captains, we have people doing the same thing but only on Facebook and Twitter, Mr. Hemingway said. They are out there recruiting people, giving them messaging, and then they broadcast those messages to their networks on Twitter and Facebook. He said the campaign had already started to urge supporters to identify family and friends to join them at the polls. And, like most of the other candidates, Mr. Gingrich is recruiting volunteers online to make calls on

his behalf to prospective voters in New Hampshire and Iowa. People can also see which of their Facebook friends have already made calls for Mr. Gingrich. Through Facebook, you pull down a link and you can call from home, said Mr. Hemingway, whose phone bank room at Gingrich headquarters in New Hampshire is equipped with netbooks and headphones for supporters who want to go to traditional phone rooms. We are doing more calls per hour than any campaign in the state. Republicans are looking to duplicate what President Obama managed to do four years ago, galvanizing supporters online to raise hundreds of millions of dollars and integrate his digital efforts into the field operation to mobilize voters. During last years midterm elections, Republican candidates and voters caught up with Democrats in deploying social media. In studies released this year, the Pew Research Centers Internet and American Life Project found that 40 percent of Republican online users turned to social media to get information and to become politically involved in a campaign during the midterm elections last year. These are tools that can be used to drive real-world action and encourage people to take action beyond posting news and talking to their friends, said Aaron Smith, a senior researcher at the Pew Center. Our view is that social media allows a campaign to identify those rock-star supporters and get them to take action on their behalf. Digital strategists for the candidates said they were mindful that online efforts alone would not be enough to mobilize the foot soldiers they need to get out the vote and win. Mr. Gingrichs hundreds of thousands of Facebook fans and Twitter followers were not enough to get him the 10,000 signatures he needed to get on the ballot in Virginia. Also, half of Iowans are not on Facebook, so candidates have been bombarding them with mailers, traditional television advertising and automated phone calls from candidates. Striking that balance between old and new is vital for Mrs. Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and Mr. Gingrich, who are all vying for the support of the states evangelical Christians. While Christian conservatives and Tea Party activists now have a robust online and social media presence, it was this collection of Bible study groups, anti-abortion activists, homeschooling parents and other evangelical Christian groups that helped the Republican Mike Huckabee win the Iowa caucuses in 2008. It is about finding people who can amplify your voice to them, said R. Rebecca Donatelli, digital strategist for Mrs. Bachmann. It is the old concept of coalitions made new again. Vincent Harris, digital adviser to Mr. Perry, said he used geo-location mobile advertising to help deliver the Texas governors faith message to students at 10 Christian colleges across Iowa. Mr. Perrys campaign also learned about the perils of social media. After his Im proud to be a Christian video, criticizing gay soldiers, went viral on YouTube, opponents responded with their own videos. One of them, Jesus Responds to Rick Perrys Strong Video has had more than 145,000 views on YouTube. Still, Mr. Hagle, the political science professor, said social media were not expected to replace old-fashioned retail politics. People want to take a measure of a candidate, he said. It is an important part of the process here in Iowa, or at least we think it is.

All Facebook: Paul, Gingrich Up on Facebook Prior to Iowa Caucus http://allfacebook.com/paul-gingrich-up-on-facebook-prior-to-iowa-caucus_b72162 Jennifer Moire December 27, 2011 With exactly one week before voting gets underway in the Republican presidential primary contest, new polling and the Inside Facebook 2012 Election Tracker convey a fluid field before next Tuesdays Iowa caucus. New polling from the American Research Group of likely Iowa voters effectively showed a three-way tie between Ron Paul at 21 percent, Mitt Romney at 20 percent, and Newt Gingrich at 19 percent. UPDATE: A poll released Tuesday night by Public Policy Polling had Gingrich slipping and Paul rising, with Paul at 24 percent, Romney at 20 percent, and Gingrich at 13 percent. Our Inside Election Trackers look at Facebook fan-page growth in the past week supports the notion that Paul is a front-runner. He showed the most growth in new Facebook fans among the top three GOP contenders, followed by Gingrich and Romney, despite a week when the spotlight was on Paul for inflammatory content in a newsletter that was published in his name in the 1990s. Romney, however, still holds a commanding lead among the presidential hopefuls in overall Facebook fans, with more than 1,236,857. Romneys latest campaign ad, titled Conservative Agenda, has been shared 3,252 times since it was posted Monday on the campaigns Facebook wall. In other campaign news, Gingrichs campaign manager took to the candidates Facebook page over the weekend with a statement regarding the campaigns failure to appear on the Virginia ballot on Super Tuesday, March 6. In remarks that were shared 67 times, with more than 1,000 likes and 644 comments, Michael Krull said, This was not due to a lack of effort by our volunteers, but the cumbersome process in Virginia. We are exploring alternate methods to compete in Virginia stay tuned. Do you think the growth in Facebook fans will indicate who will win the Iowa caucus Jan. 3?

TechCrunch: Ron Paul is the Second Most Popular Candidate on Facebook (And Hes Gaining) http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/23/ron-paul-is-the-second-most-popular-republican-candidate-onfacebook-and-hes-gaining/ Eric Eldon December 23, 2011 I know there are lots of people out there who have passionate feelings about Ron Paul. Hes a principled and independent fighter for old-time American values, or a conspiracy theorist loon, or someone who let idiotic racist stuff get published in his newsletters decades ago or whatever else it is that you see about him that makes you react. Im not here to take sides and tell you how to vote, Im just writing this article to point out that hes been gaining the most new Facebook fans every day for most of the past month. Hes now the second-most

popular candidate behind Mitt Romney (and Democratic incumbent Barack Obama, of course), according to the Inside Facebook Election Tracker. Paul currently has 655,000 fans, half of Romneys 1.23 million, and a fraction of Obamas 24.3 million, but hes well ahead of third-place primary candidate Michele Bachmann. Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich, who has appeared at many points in recent weeks to be Romneys main Republican challenger, has had pretty minimal growth. Fan counts are not a perfect proxy for real-world popularity because candidates can do things like buy lots of ads on Facebook, run contests on their Pages to bring in more people, or promote their Like buttons on their campaign web sites. Also worth noting: the fan counts here are far lower than the active voters out there, so this is a subpopulation of politically involved people. Facebook has around two-thirds of the US online population, and anyone in the world can like Facebook Pages. Its just that most people dont. But the trends do seem to reflect many of the voter shifts in the primary over the last month. By numerical gains, Paul has had the most new fans every day since December 5th, the election tracker shows. The rise began around when previous top outsider candidate Herman Cain announced he would drop out. It leveled off for a bit during a short Rick Perry resurgence, right around the 8th of the month, when Perry released his widely hated Strong video against gays in the military. So maybe Perry gained some Facebook fans even though he created the most disliked video on YouTube? But as Perrys blip tapered down towards zero, both Gingrich and Paul grew. Its true that Romney has surged over the past week or two as Cain, Perry and Gingrich have faded down. But Paul has gained even more every day, with monthly growth highs among all candidates at nearly 7,000 new fans per day at some points last week. Maybe its because of how people are receiving his debate performance. What does it all mean? Until a few months ago, online success for Paul might have been chalked up to the relatively small but very earnest group of online supporters, who have helped him win online polls for years. But now hes also winning real-world polls, like in the Iowa primaries. His Facebook fan growth is looking more and more like a proxy for his overall trajectory. Technology Digital: Barack Obama Becomes More Social for the 2012 Campaign http://www.technology-digital.com/social_media/barack-obama-becomes-more-social-for-the-2012campaign Pooja Thakkar December 23, 2011 Call him the Digital Candidate or a Social Candidate: President Barack Obama is active on almost all social networking platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and more recently Tumblr. The President is asking supporters to use Facebook to declare "I'm In!" for his re-election campaign and is personally tweeting to blast out messages to his nearly 9 million followers. The Obama campaign declines to say how many of its supporters have clicked the "I'm In!" button, but Facebook brings Obama's campaign to millions of news feeds, allowing supporters to share content, plan events and recruit friends in ways that email couldn't in 2008.

If Obama broke new ground in 2008 using email, text messages and the Web to reach voters, Obama s 2012 campaign aims to take the Web campaign to the next level harnessing the expansive roles that the Internet and social media are playing in voters' lives. Emails to supporters seek small-dollar donations in exchange for campaign coffee mugs or a chance to win dinner with the president. The campaign's website helps supporters find local events, plan meetings and raise money. The new campaign logo featured on the items includes the celebrated image of a rising sun used in 2008, but this time nestled in the "0" of 2012. Twitter, meanwhile, was still in its infancy when Obama first ran for president and played little role in that campaign. This time, Obama has signaled the value of his (at)barackobama handle, telling supporters he'll regularly send personal tweets signed "-BO." By its nature, Twitter allows the campaign to monitor public opinion on a minute-by-minute basis, respond to critics and shape the news. Obama also released a two-minute YouTube video telling viewers, It begins with us.The Video does not feature the candidate himself speaking but a diverse range of supporters explaining why he should be given another four years in the White House in the November 2012 elections. Obamas betting big on Social Media support Obama relied heavily on the web during his 2008 presidential campaign for organizing, fundraising and communicating and his recent reelection campaign with a social media barrage launch made it clear he plans on doing so again, building a grassroots campaign online. In his message to supporters, Obama said "the politics we believe in does not start with expensive TV ads or extravaganzas, but with you -- with people organizing block-by-block, talking to neighbors, co-workers, and friends. "We'll start by doing something unprecedented: coordinating millions of one-on-one conversations between supporters across every single state, reconnecting old friends, inspiring new ones to join the cause, and readying ourselves for next year's fight," Obama added. According to a recent national poll of Americas 18 to 29 year olds by Harvards Institute of Politics (IOP), a majority of Millennials (55%) approve of the job performance of President Barack Obama, a rise of six percentage points from IOP polling conducted last October. The Obama campaign can however take a different approach to social media by treating it as a gateway to open a two-way dialogue, not a vehicle for pushing out traditional campaign talking points. Social media has gone from a publishing platform to a really interactive space, said Andrew Foxwell, manager of marketing and new media at iConstituent. TechPresident: From YouTube to Facebook, New Digital Targeting Helps Romney Campaign Reach Voters http://techpresident.com/news/21546/youtube-facebook-romney-digital-ad-targeting Sarah Lai Stirland December 22, 2011

As potential caucus goers and voters in Iowa and New Hampshire go about their lives this Christmas season, they're likely to see Mitt Romney appear in unexpected places. If they watch on-demand content online, they're likely to see a 30-second spot for Romney on Hulu or YouTube in the days leading up to the contests in those states. Or if they own a mobile device, they might see an ad that asks them to volunteer, or to get engaged in some other way with the campaign. It's all part of a wider ad targeting campaign that the Romney team has carefully planned over the year as it hunts for voters in every virtual nook and cranny in the emerging post-live television world, blanketing Iowa in targeted online ads that use just about every new trick in the Internet marketing playbook. "We've made a very conscious decision to reach out to folks who might otherwise miss our message," said Zac Moffatt, the Romney campaign's digital media director. Moffatt is working with his old colleagues at the Republican digital strategy consulting firm Targeted Victory in Arlington, Va. and the digital advertising agency SAY Media to buy ad space and tailor the messages there to those audiences who've "cut the cord" with their cable companies, or who simply don't turn on the television anymore. SAY Media promises media buyers that it can reach 165 million people a month on the web and on mobile devices who are not likely to be big watchers of live television. It reaches these people by conducting surveys of the audience, and working with audience measurement firm Quantcast to develop its model. It also only charges ad buyers if members of the audience engage with their ads. Targeted Victory conducted a bi-partisan study about the television viewing habits of likely voters along with their Democratic counterparts Chong & Koster, political polling firms Public Opinion Strategies and SEA Polling & Strategic Design and SAY Media earlier this year. They found that about a third of likely voters don't watch live television, and that 45 percent say they watch "something else" other than live television as their primary form of video consumption. Worse news for campaign advertisers is that in the battleground state of Ohio, they found that nearly 40 percent of likely voters surveyed had not watched live television in the past week that they were surveyed. Unsurprisingly, the group also found that most voters with digital video recorders skip ads. The group acknowledges that the lion's share of the projected $3 billion in political ad spending in 2012 will still be in television, despite their findings. Already, in Des Moines, IA market alone, the campaigns have spent $1.4 million on television ads, according to the Campaign Media Analysis Group and The Washington Post. The question is whether those ads are reaching the intended audience. The Romney campaign is exploring how to target those ads more efficiently. Team Mitt's work largely involves online video, but search and zip-code targeting on Facebook, as well as buying keywords on Twitter and Google, are part of the mix too. "The majority of all our digital advertising at this stage is video advertising, so it's highly-targeted rich media," says Moffatt. "We have all the reserve inventory in Iowa and New Hampshire for pre-roll for YouTube. We're the only one running it in those two states, and we're also up on Hulu." He adds that the Romney campaign has bought all of the pre-roll ad space on longer-form content shown in Iowa on YouTube for the entire month going up to the January 3 caucuses.

The company is also working with the online audience targeting firm Lotame. The ads and their placement are based on a year's worth of work of doing surveys of the kinds of people the Romney campaign hopes to persuade to vote for him. Targeted Victory has worked with Lotame in the past on the campaigns of Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Washington State's Dino Rossi, who lost his bid for a senate seat against Democratic incumbent Patti Murray in 2010. "We have a kind of a holistic buying strategy," Moffatt says. "Everything we're doing on TV, we're aligning with online, and so we're either targeting individuals based upon what our modeling shows are 'off-thegridders,' who are likely voters, but who are not watching live television as much." Online or mobile video placement can also be used to engage voters. Moffatt says that in addition to the ads that are designed to persuade voters, other ads are designed to mobilize those who already support the former governor of Massachusetts. So links to the Iowa GOP's page for caucus information and locations are embedded in some of Romney's videos. Other mobile ads, served up via Google's mobile advertising company AdMob, will contain pre-roll YouTube ads. Another set will feature buttons that connect voters directly to the campaign. "If you're in a certain geolocation we think is important, and if you want to engage, there would be an ability for you to click-to-call within the ad unit," Moffatt explains. "You would call our volunteer location and then be connected with someone to get involved." Moffatt says that the Romney campaign spends a minimum of 10 percent of its ad budget on its digital strategy, and most of that is spent on actionable video as he just described. But Facebook and Google play a role too. "Intent marketing is obviously going to be your highest-return-on investment because someone has gone into Google and typed in a word, and they have an intent to take an action," he says. Facebook's new zip code targeting feature is useful to mobilize people who have already indicated that they 'like' the campaign, he adds. "We've found for crowd-building, Facebook is a very positive way of doing it. Those people are naturally built in, so if Mitt's going to be in a certain geolocation, we can turn those people out." Mobile phones are another big tool in the toolbox of geo-targeting. Voters who've texted the campaign to be updated with Romney's whereabouts in New Hampshire are notified by text when the candidate is about to make an appearance at an event in or near their zip code (if they've provided it to the campaign.) The Romney campaign isn't the only one that's trying to bridge the gap between television and the web. Texas' Rep. Ron Paul has been aggressively advertising on television with his hard-hitting ads against former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Those ads have run online and have been placed in conservative outlets online such as the IowaRepublican.com political news blog as well. Eric Frenchman, chief Internet strategist at Connell Donatelli & Campaign Solutions, says that he's actually surprised at how little he's heard about political campaigns buying ads on platforms like Hulu.

"I think GoogleTV and Hulu bridge the gap between what a traditional offline media buyer would be doing, and what an online media buyer would do, and I think in 2012, youre going to see those lines blur," he says. But perhaps that's because the campaigns have been flying under the radar. Moffatt says that his team has kept its head down working on its infrastructure, which is designed to scale to accommodate rapid growth in support. "I would never underestimate Ron Paul's supporters," he says when asked about the rival Paul campaign's success in packing Iowa events with supporters of the very age and demographic that Romney's campaign is also after. "But we'll see in two weeks." POLITICO: Campaigns Capitalize on Facebook http://www.politico.com/politico44/2011/12/campaigns-capitalize-on-facebook-108411.html Byron Tau December 21, 2011 Ron Paul is averaging $2 million a day. Newt Gingrich is putting his supporters to work making online phone calls. And President Obama and other candidates have embedded Facebook into the very DNA of their campaign websites. Is this the cycle in which presidential campaigns finally figure out how to effectively use Facebook as a campaign tool? An internal Facebook analysis shared with POLITICO shows how three presidential candidates in particular are leveraging the social network effectively raising money, mobilizing volunteers and engaging supporters. Some highlights: -- Ron Paul surging in the Iowa polls is adding Facebook fans faster than any other candidate. He has added over 6,000 a day in the last two weeks. More importantly, he's been able to leverage that support into a substantial amount of money, using a custom Facebook application to raise more than $4 million in two days in an online 'moneybomb.' The company estimates that at this rate, he could raise $25 million before the end of the month. -- Newt Gingrich, who actually launched his campaign on Facebook, has developed an application that allows volunteers to make campaign phone calls. He's also added an element of competition to the mix, allowing users to see how many phone calls their friends have made. This social game also tracks canvassing efforts. And he has also used his page to put out calls for help getting on the Virginia ballot. -- President Obama has launched a full merchandise store, and has used the platform to engage his massive 24 million fan audience, including promoting his campaign's Win A Dinner with the president contest. It's a sea change from 2008 when campaigns floundered in using social networks to either raise funds or engage volunteers. In 2008, there was the famous 'One Million Strong for Barack Obama' group but the Obama campaign itself treaded carefully. Instead of engaging on third-party sites like Facebook, the Obama campaign built their own proprietary social network and wrested control of unofficial groups and pages away from volunteers.

And earlier this year, I reported on how campaigns were eyeing open platforms like Facebook and Twitter with a touch of wariness particularly after supporters of the president turned his website mybarackobama.com into a platform to sound off on the President's policy on the Patriot Act. Apparently, they have embraced the upside. Full analysis after the jump The Obama campaign has been engaging with constituents in a few unique ways: Dinner with Barack the Obama campaign has used Facebook to encourage the presidents 24 million supporters to support the campaign for a chance to join Barack and Michelle Obama for dinner. Obama recently posted a video update on the contest, telling his supporters, Its not about me, its about you, and thanking them for the work theyve done to promote the campaign. Obama kicked off his re-election campaign by asking Facebook supporters, Are you in? through a custom Facebook app. The app displayed a badge on users Facebook walls if they joined the campaign, and allowed them to recruit other friends by sharing the badge and the app. This is substantially the same platform Gingrich has expanded upon with his online phone application. Obama also launched a full campaign store in a Facebook tab, encouraging supporters to purchase campaign posters, hats, shirts and other campaign paraphernalia. Fans could also share links to their favorite campaign merchandise with friends. Ron Paul: Fueling a Cinderella Rise with a Multi-Million Dollar Facebook Money Bomb Over the past week, Texas Rep. Ron Paul leapt from fourth place to first place in Iowa public polling. Pauls remarkable surge hasnt just occurred in Iowa. Nationwide, Paul is adding the most Facebook fans of any presidential candidate: over 6,000 a day for the past two weeks. Now Paul is mobilizing a fleet of custom Facebook apps to turn his 650,000 fans into vital campaign dollars. This week marks Pauls second Money Bomb fundraising drive. The first Ron Paul Money Bomb was held in February of 2008, and raised over $1 million in a 24-hour period. Fast forward to December 2011: this years Facebook Money Bomb has already raised $4 million in under two days. And Pauls social Money Bomb isnt over yet. At the current rate of donations, Paul could bring in a staggering $25 million or more before the end of the month. That would place him among the top tier of candidates by quarterly fundraising value, almost entirely through Facebook outreach. Paul reached the summit of social fundraising by leaning on some of Facebooks embedded tools: The Donate to Ron Paul app encourages Facebook supporters to submit contributions directly through Pauls official page. Supporters can also let their friends know theyve donated. Its not surprising that Paul has seen a swell of contributions Facebook users are more than twice as likely to click links and support pages if their friends share them. The Ron Paul Facebook Supporter app is unique among candidates. Paul supporters can provide their name, e-mail and cell phone numbers in exchange for access to VIP information. The app also allows fans to ask their friends to join, broadening vital campaign e-mail and cell phone contact lists.

Unlike other 2012 Republican contenders, Paul is parlaying his fervent Facebook support into an expanding web of connections. Inside Facebooks Election Tracker shows the results: Pauls campaign has nearly doubled its growth rate over the past two weeks, while Newt Gingrich has suffered a 50% drop in social engagement. Newt Gingrich: Regaining Momentum through a Social Engagement Push With harsh campaign ads from Republican challengers Mitt Romney and Ron Paul denting his poll performance in Iowa, embattled Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich is turning to Facebook to regain his momentum. The figures are stark. The Inside Facebook Election tracker, which tracks how many Facebook users are liking a candidates page every day, shows Gingrich suffering a steep drop during the first week of December. Previously the most popular candidate on Facebook by new likes over 2,000 a day Gingrich has fallen to a distant third place, with the number of new Facebook supporters falling by over 60%. Gingrich launched his campaign on Facebook, and he isnt giving up the fight. Gingrich recently debuted a new social app that allows supporters to make campaign calls on behalf of the Gingrich campaign, while also showing supporters how many calls their friends have made. Gingrich is taking a page from social gaming by providing friendly competition that also canvasses the vital early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. Gingrich is also prioritizing the Virginia primary in a series of posts on his official page. Gingrich posted his Virginia tour schedule in a Facebook note and used a new app to encourage supporters to Get Newt on the Virginia Ballot! As the Iowa caucus rapidly approaches, Gingrich is pouring more time and effort into Facebook outreach and there are signs hes reaping the benefits. Thousands have signed up for Gingrichs phone application, and his donor page assisted in an early December fundraising Money Bomb. More importantly, Gingrich is engaging voters by connecting directly through personal photos, videos and volunteer appeals. Gingrich likes his chances of pulling a social media upset. Will other campaigns follow his lead? Huffington Post: Michele Bachmann Woos Iowa Voters with Video, Social Media http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/18/michele-bachmann-iowa_n_1156369.html Jon Ward December 18, 2011 EMMETSBURG, Iowa -- Michele Bachmann entered the Pizza Ranch, a ubiquitous chain in Iowa, here Saturday afternoon, shook a few hands, and then went behind the counter to pose with the chain store's staff for a video. A Bachmann staffer held up a small camcorder and recorded the Republican presidential candidate giving a short greeting directly to Palo Alto County residents. Bachmann's campaign manager, Keith Nahigian, told The Huffington Post the clip would be part of a "caucus training video." "They will help people: This is the caucus; this is what it is; this is the day; this is the time," Nahigian said. "What we're doing is 99 different county videos to give back to our county chair -- we have county chairs in all 99 counties -- to give to their precinct captains to send out on social media, Facebook."

"We have ability to email according to their zip codes and their Google imaging mapping of like on Facebook and other things, so we can place them right in the counties, all 99 counties," Nahigian said. Bachmann on Sunday is launching day three of a 99-county bus tour that is ambitious in scope to the point that some campaign stops, like the one at a very crowded coffee shop in Algona on Saturday, consisted of her walking in the door, shaking hands and posing for photos for a few minutes, and then being gently pushed out the door by her husband, Marcus, to keep her on schedule. Mr. Bachmann told HuffPost he was performing a variety of functions. "Time keeper, encourager, police, muscle," he joked. Bachmann visited 13 different towns in 13 counties on Saturday, starting at 9 a.m. and finishing up more than 12 hours later. She is doing 28 events over the first three days of the bus tour starting Sunday. So each stop is rushed, and some pass in the blink of an eye. But at most of them, Nahigian said, Bachmann was taping a video to arm their campaign with an individualized message to recruit caucus-goers, largely over social media. "We are going to have 99 localized videos talking directly to that unique county," Nahigian said. "We will also do a different version for caucuses, where someone wants to stand up and hold an iPad and play her video. It will be a direct appeal to that county." "No one's ever done this, so it's kind of cool." Campaign Solutions, a Virginia-based firm, is helping the Bachmann campaign target the videos to Facebook users in the right counties, for example. The Bachmann campaign has been innovative in its use of technology already this cycle, targeting Bachmann ads to land on the smart phones of Iowans at the state fair in August. McClatchy: Election 2012 Campaigns Are All Over Facebook http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/12/15/133210/election-2012-campaigns-are-all.html Laura Phelps December 15, 2011 WASHINGTON As more presidential candidates ask us to "like" them on Facebook, some campaign consultants argue that targeted Facebook political advertising will change the coming year's election map, from the presidential race to local elections. This election cycle, campaigns are making much larger staff and financial investments in social media marketing, said Michael Beach, a co-founder of the Republican digital-strategy firm Targeted Victory. "It's night and day different" from 2008, Beach said in explaining the importance of Facebook now. Beach estimated that the average campaign spends about 25 percent of its budget on online strategy, and while he thinks the amount will increase as it gets closer to Election Day next November, the percentage will not. The online strategies will be strong supplements to traditional outreach such as get-out-the-vote campaigns and TV spots, but won't replace them, according to Pew Research Center researcher Aaron Smith.

Consultant Josh Koster, a managing partner at Chong and Koster, a progressive digital-media communications firm, said campaign budgets used to be about two things: raising money and spending it on TV. But this year's budgets reflect today's new media market as more Americans go to the Internet for news. This is the first major election cycle that online strategy is receiving a large media budget for advertising, Koster said. Facebook and Google are the two most popular places for big ad buys, he said. This year, Facebook implemented stronger ZIP code targeting, Koster said, and that's changed the game. ZIP code targeting will become important during persuasion pushes for casual supporters closer to the election. As of May, 60 percent of all U.S. adults and 76 percent of U.S. adult Internet users are on Facebook, according to the Pew Research Center. ZIP-code targeting for ads allows even "dogcatcher" races to become visible and contested, Koster said. Leading up to November 2010's midterm elections, 22 percent of adults online used social networking sites such as Facebook to connect with campaigns or learn about the election, according to Pew. Facebook remains a key platform for candidates because of the sheer volume of messages they can send. While email campaigns are restricted by the number of emails they can send to supporters before becoming invasive, Facebook lets the candidates reach voters several times a day, Beach said. "Facebook and social media make it much easier to organize to raise money and to engage supporters because successful campaigns ultimately are about social organizing," said Andrew Rasiej, a co-founder of techPresident, a blog that covers how candidates use Web technology. "If a political conversation is happening on Facebook, then to be able to donate where the conversation is happening is key," he said. Directing supporters away from Facebook to make donations on campaign sites leads people to websites they've never heard of that don't surround them with the peer pressure of their friends' engagement. But even Facebook donation apps aren't one-step, so some campaigns prefer to direct them to campaign websites, where they have more control of the content. Republican or Democrat, candidates are running similar campaigns on Facebook, Beach said, they're just at different phases. Republican Mitt Romney's supporter list of just more than 1.2 million is in the shadows of President Barack Obama's 24.24 million Facebook supporters. But ultimately, he said, campaigns try to copy one another whenever a new tool is proved effective. Koster said he thought Republicans were slightly more aggressive with online ads in 2010 because they were "playing catch-up," but that it was an even playing field now. On Facebook, it's not always about the money. Pew's Smith said Facebook users tended to be more engaged. They're more likely to vote, to attend rallies or meetings and to try to convince their friends to vote. Facebook users are five times more likely to consider themselves politically engaged than non-Facebook users are, according to Pew.

That's why applications that allow campaigns to access their supporters' data to automatically publish when supporters RSVP to events or share articles about the candidates will be important tools for campaigns in 2012, Beach said. "Facebook and social media is like a water cooler discussion on steroids," Rasiej said. Romney's team launched a new welcome page on Facebook a couple of weeks ago, said the campaign's digital director, Zac Moffatt. The page isn't a typical "wall" for users to comment on. It links to videos, news, the store and other features. Moffatt said the campaign decided to go where the people were instead of waiting for Facebook users to discover Romney's website. Moffatt said the president's huge database of names from the last six years, gathered by the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee, was both an asset and an anchor to outdated technology. Tech decisions made in 2008 would be quite different from decisions made about infrastructure now, Moffatt said. Still, to compare Romney with Obama wouldn't be an apples-to-apples comparison, he said. Romney's online campaign has been building only since April. Obama, however, has the advantage of powerful analytics that measure how users interact with the campaign's content, Rasiej said. "The Obama administration has the advantage of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts," he said. "Regardless of which candidate, the Republicans are going to be playing catch-up." Just because someone is highly engaged on Facebook doesn't mean he doesn't interact with the campaign elsewhere, of course. "There probably aren't mutually exclusive groups," Smith said. "The people who are engaging on your website are probably engaging also on your Facebook page or YouTube channel." Moffatt said he fully expected that there would be people who voted for Romney and never visited his website. "Facebook has the ability to get people to take another action," Moffatt said. "It's about the timeliness of what it is you're trying to do: debates, endorsements, big news help." Facebook is unique from other social media sites because it's not only the largest, but it also has a more demographically broad user base a mix of ages, incomes and races when compared with sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter, Smith said. Romney's team uses Facebook differently from the way it uses Twitter. The candidate often updates in the first person on Twitter, but Facebook is a place for a larger campaign discussion between staff and supporters, Moffatt said.

"Political campaigns are also realizing that Facebook exists beyond Facebook.com (apps, mobile, etc,) and Facebook can be a component of other political activities as well," Facebook's Andrew Noyes said. "We've witnessed Facebook integration with websites, 'check-ins' at events, mentions in speeches, links on TV ads and more." With an NBC/Facebook GOP candidate debate approaching Jan. 8, social media has changed stagnant TV debates, Rasiej said. If a candidates makes a gaffe on TV, his or her campaign has to manage it in real time, sometimes before a debate is even over. "Spin is being created on social media faster than it can be created by spin doctors," he said. "The candidate who doesn't pay attention to social media as they're on TV is blind." Facebook has created a new page for the 2012 election to curate campaign information: Facebook.com/USPolitics. FACEBOOK SUPPORTERS AS OF DEC. 6: _ Barack Obama: 24,243,220 _ Mitt Romney: 1,207,592 _ Ron Paul: 612,210 _ Michele Bachmann: 272,405 _ Newt Gingrich: 205,351 _ Rick Perry: 171,468 _ Rick Santorum: 34,171 _ Jon Huntsman: 26,949 Bloomberg: Obama's Re-Election Path May Be Written In Will St. Clair's Code http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-14/obama-s-re-election-path-may-be-written-in-will-st-clair-scode.html By Julianna Goldman December 14, 2011 Will St. Clair, wearing semi-rimless glasses, a plaid buttoned-down shirt, jeans and Adidas sneakers, can usually be found sitting on an exercise ball in the back of President Barack Obamas campaign headquarters, his eyes trained on his computer screen. The 23-year-olds job is a mystery even to some senior staff in Chicago, yet they say they hope the skills he brings are a secret weapon: hes a software engineer. St. Clair is among more than a dozen developers hired by the campaign to leverage technology to wring out more votes in what Obamas advisers say may be an election as close as the contested 2000 race between

George W. Bush and Al Gore. From Seattle startups to International Business Machines Corp., theyve left lucrative jobs to mine for swing voters. They've added a new term to the strategic lexicon: microlistening. Right now, if you want to call this the data arms race, clearly Democrats are ahead, said Alex Gage, CEO of TargetPoint Consulting, who worked on voter targeting for Bushs successful re-election effort in 2004. The Obama campaign is guarding the details of the operation like the political equivalent of nuclear secrets: Ill be happy to discuss what were doing after we do it, said David Axelrod, Obamas chief political strategist. The things we did in 2008 in many ways were prehistoric by contemporary standards, Axelrod said at a Dec. 7 Bloomberg View lunch. Theres a lot you can do in the way of more finely targeting voters so theyre getting information thats useful to them. Micro Campaign St. Clair and his team are creating tools to connect with people properly. For example, disenchanted voters are wooed, not hit up for money. They call it microlistening. Other hints can be gleaned from an Obama campaign job posting that Gage, now consulting for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, took note of last spring recruiting quantitative analysts. The Obama for America analytics department analyzes the campaigns data to guide election strategy and develop quantitative, actionable insights that drive our decision- making, it says. We are a multidisciplinary team of statisticians, mathematicians, software developers, general analysts and organizers -- all striving for a single goal: re- electing President Obama. The Obama team is taking technology development in-house. In 2008 we were very adept users of technology, said Michael Slaby, the campaigns chief integration and innovation officer. We are much more ambitious about what were capable of building on our own. Political Hurdles To be sure, no amount of technological sophistication may be enough for Obama to overcome stubbornly high unemployment, which his administration forecasts will be above 8 percent next year. Since World War II, no U.S. president has won re-election with a jobless rate above 6 percent, with the exception of Ronald Reagan, who faced 7.2 percent unemployment on Election Day in 1984. Obamas opponents also are seeking new ways to employ technology and build on the voter targeting effort in Bushs 2004 re-election. Republicans realize they have to catch up, and Im reasonably confident they will, Gage said. Will they surpass them? No. While its the first foray into campaigning for many of Obamas quantitative analysts, the experience of trying to outmaneuver rivals like Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. may be ideal for the world of innovative political warfare.

We have all these engineers here, who were part of start- ups and almost all of them competed against some giant behemoth, said Harper Reed, the campaigns chief technology officer, who recruited based on who hed want for any start-up. Business Model Reed was formerly CTO of Threadless, a Chicago-based T- shirt company whose business model relies on crowdsourcing to design and sell its products. The privately held company lets artists submit designs for a public vote. Reed said the companys revenue increased 10-fold from when he started with Threadless in 2005 to when he left in 2009. Unshaven, with black plastic-rimmed glasses and stretched earlobes adorned with metal hoop earrings, Reed, 33, is emblematic of a hipster style coexisting with the traditional. Staffers joke that facial hair is required in the dimly-lit back section of the office reserved for Slabys team. Artists Brush Like artists who only paint with certain brushes, many of the engineers brought their own keyboards. Reeds is black and has no labels -- he likes the noise it makes and the bounce to the fingers. Rather than chairs, many sit on large exercise balls. Or they dont sit at all, electing instead to prop their computers on cardboard boxes and work standing up. There was a weird sense when you came in here that you were changing the campaign just by coexisting in the same spaces as everyone else, said Anders Conbere, 28, an engineer who brought his own keyboard when he moved from Seattle. Reed convinced Conbere to leave his job as a software developer for Estately Inc., a real estate index described on its website as a Seattle-based team of geeks taking on the $50 billion real estate industry. Earlier in his career, Conbere worked at aQuantive, an Internet advertising firm, when it was purchased by Microsoft Corp. for $6 billion in 2007 -- the biggest acquisition for the company until it bought Skype Technologies SA earlier this year. To make every vote count in this difficult election climate, theres little room for error, and the right staff is critical, according to Tim OReilly, founder and CEO of OReilly Media, a computer book publisher. Deliberate Magic They got lucky the first time, OReilly, who advised the campaign earlier this year, said. They had a bunch of idealistic volunteers who came out of nowhere to help them. Theyre trying to do deliberately what happened by magic last time. OReilly coined the term microlistening when he met with campaign officials and heard what they were trying to do. They are parsing constituent concerns in fine detail. Its easy to generate a lot of data and miss the point so, if done right, the work is more valuable than any poll, strategists say. It comes down to data -- collecting voter information, synthesizing it and making use of it most effectively. The data comes from conversations on the ground and behavioral patterns on the website. Analysts may try to determine how to best target a voter who gives $5 to participate in a raffle to have dinner with the president versus $5 during a Republican debate.

Approach to Voters If a supporter tells the campaign that a neighbor who voted for Obama in 2008, lost his job, is frustrated with the presidents handling of the economy and is now undecided, the most important distillation of that information may be that sending someone out to ask for a donation could cost Obama that vote. There are always going to be enough people out there to vote for Barack Obama, said Clay Johnson, founder of Blue State Digital Media LLC, which managed Obamas online campaign in 2008. The question is whether they can be persuaded, organized and activated enough to get to the polls and technology is going to be the thing that does that, said Johnson, author of The Information Diet. Beyond targeting, theyre finding ways to boost efficiency at all levels of the organization -- even the online store. Quick Analysis Last month, one group of engineers noticed that people trying to buy products like Obama T-shirts using mobile devices werent completing their purchases. Others on the team quickly realized that the site, a key fundraising tool, wasnt user friendly for smart-phones. Within a week, another group of engineers changed the interface and sales went up that day. We never would have figured it out during the last campaign, Slaby said. We didnt have enough skill in any of these three places to put data in a place that could be intelligently analyzed and acted on quickly. Slaby and Reed hope to keep expanding, recruiting engineers largely by word of mouth. Its how Anders decided to move to Chicago only weeks after purchasing a home in Seattle. Over coffee last spring, Reed told Slaby hed join the campaign and immediately wanted to lock in their next hire. Anders was 2,100 miles away, driving home from work with his wife when he received a 2-word text message from Reed: Dude. Obama. I just turned to my wife and said, Lets move to Chicago. ClickZ: Perry Pushes Iowa Faith Message on Pandora and Facebook http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/2132869/perry-pushes-faith-message-pandora-facebook Kate Kaye December 14, 2011 Rick Perry's online campaign is targeting faith-based Iowa caucus voters. A newly-strengthened digital staff has been targeting Iowa evangelicals through Facebook ads, pushing faith-oriented messaging to country and holiday music listeners on Pandora, and driving pro-Perry mobile messages to students at Christian colleges in the Hawkeye state.

Primary observers suggest the Perry camp's message to Iowa voters is focused on conservative Christian ideals, and his online ad and social media efforts appear to be in lock step. Iowa residents reminiscing with Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" on Pandora may hear an audio spot in which the Texas Governor professes, "I think we all need God's help." The 15-second ads, targeted to Iowans listening to country, holiday, Christian, and 80s music, are accompanied by standard display and large background ads on the streaming audio site, and are also aimed at mobile Pandora users. Longer versions of the "Faith" ad have been running on TV and radio. Several different ad creatives on Facebook and in Google's content network linking to related videos are aimed at veterans, evangelicals, and other groups in Iowa. Like the "Faith" video which the campaign is still heavily advertising online, another recent video, entitled "Strong," has attracted media coverage and taken flak, in part for its implication that gays should not be allowed to serve in the military. The campaign is no longer doing much to promote the Strong video, but both have similar messaging. "I'm not ashamed to talk about my faith," declares Perry in the Faith video; in Strong, he says, "I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a Christian." Most of Perry's YouTube videos feature overlay ads that link to the campaign site or elsewhere. Until recently, Perry's campaign had done little online advertising, but changes to the campaign's digital media approach - including a new addition to the digital staff - seem to be changing that. Vincent Harris, founder and CEO of Republican digital shop, Harris Media, recently joined the Perry camp in a lead digital role. New digital campaign elements, along with the online ads and increase in web video, include a special Facebook tab aimed at Iowa voters that links to a "caucus for Rick Perry" signup form, and Iowa-centric profile images on Facebook and Twitter. Last week, Perry ads on Facebook encouraged former supporters of Herman Cain to make the switch to Perry. Other recent online efforts include a new microsite, EstablishmentInsider.com, which features a negative TV spot lumping together Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich as supporters of President Barack Obama's healthcare reform. The site encourages people to share the video via email, Facebook, or Twitter, and plays on the "Washington Outsider" reputation Perry is hoping to cultivate. Roll Call: Political Campaigning Enters Age of Technology http://www.rollcall.com/issues/57_73/political-campaigning-enters-age-of-technology-210975-1.html?pg=1 Kate Tummarello December 13, 2011 With more and more constituents looking for information about their Members of Congress online, offices and campaigns are spending more time and energy focused on online advertising. While traditional banner ads and video advertisements that play before or during online videos continue to be used, some offices and candidates are reaching out to constituents. A favorite for attracting traffic to Congressional campaign websites is Google AdWords. With AdWords, the search engine giant allows advertisers to bid against one another to see who can place their text-based advertisements on a search result page. Advertisements are targeted to appear alongside specified search terms and within specified locations. The winning bidder gets an ad displayed alongside the organic search results until another advertiser places a higher bid.

According to Wesley Donehue, CEO of political Internet firm Donehue Direct, Google AdWords is the place to start when people are looking to find out more about a candidate or current Member. Donehues firm has worked with Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), who became the target of much Google searching after he yelled, You lie! at Obama during a 2009 speech. When a hot news story breaks and people want to learn more about it, *Google+ is the place to go, said Donehue, who helped Wilson direct traffic to his campaign website after the incident. Herman Cains presidential campaign used Google AdWords earlier this year. For a while, searching terms related to the sexual harassment claims being levied against him including the name of one accuser, Sharon Bialek, or Herman Cain Scandal would bring up sponsored results linking to his campaign material. Targeting Constituents The advertising technique that is gaining in popularity for Senate campaigns and House offices and campaigns is Facebook ads, which can now be narrowed down to target certain ZIP codes. According to a blog post by Facebook that was last updated about four months ago, targeting by ZIP code was introduced to give advertisers better access to users in more specific locations. Intentionally or not, ZIP codes have become particularly useful for detailing definable community populace attributes. Most influential research on demographics, including the U.S. Census, use ZIP codes as their most fine grained level of segmentation, the blog post says, explaining that the targeting opens up another avenue for advertisers to market to their desired audience. According to franking rules, House offices can advertise online, as long as the advertisements are directed only to constituents and do not include pictures of the Members. Facebooks ZIP code targeting is mostly accurate in directing Congressional ads to that Members constituents, said Andrew Foxwell, manager of new media and marketing at iConstituent, a digital communications firm that has worked with more than 300 Congressional offices and has done ads for 90 of them. Foxwell estimates that about 150 Congressmen are using Facebook advertising. According to a case study done about the company, offices that placed Facebook ads with the help of iConstituent for one week received three times as much constituent interaction on the Members official Facebook page. The case study summarized the results as being a 10X return on investment as compared to a traditional, glossy paper mailer for one-tenth of the price. For Donehue, Facebook is the way to go if you want to target specific groups in a geographically small district. Facebook is the best way to go if youre trying to reach a really niche audience, he said, citing Facebooks ability to target based on user-supplied, specific information. You cant get that level of targeting through Google. Donehue added that this could change if Googles social media platform, Google Plus, gains steam. Google then would have access to similar information about its users, giving it a better ability to target advertisements.

Two-Way Traffic Foxwell views Facebook ads as a way not just to advertise to constituents but to engage with them. Facebook and Twitter are essential tools for a 21st-century democracy, he said. If we can collectively reengage our citizens using technology and social media by breaking down barriers for meaningful dialogue, then we are doing something right by ensuring these mediums are used by Members official offices. Of course, the marketplace of ideas is a rough-and-tumble place. But that doesnt bother Foxwell. Even if you get people speaking negatively, at least their voice is being heard, he said. Others have reservations when it comes to Facebook ads, despite the low price. Jacobs said Facebook users are often on the website for social, not political, reasons. When youre on Facebook, youre not looking for that information like you are when youre searching on Google, he said. Jacobs also said that getting the attention of Facebook users, such as getting people to Like a page or status update, is not necessarily the same as getting voters. Youre getting them into your Facebook group, youre not getting their email address, he said, adding, Id rather get 10,000 email addresses than 100,000 Facebook fans. On the engaging aspect of Facebook: Well-known politicians dont need to advertise to get feedback, and lesser-known politicians can look like they just want attention. You want to at least show the flag. But Facebook users have already become savvy enough that they see through gimmicks designed to get them to click on an ad, Jacobs said. While Jacobs would suggest covering ones bases by purchasing Facebook ads, he urges clients to also devote resources to other methods. We had far more success with video and paid search, both in terms of the percentage of the clicks that turned into sign-ups and the cost per acquisition, he said, referring to the 2010 campaign of then-Rep. Tom Perriello, although the Virginia Democrat lost. Bid on a Tweet The next big thing on the horizon for Congressional offices and campaigns? Promoted content on Twitter. According to Twitter Director of Communications Matt Graves, promoted tweets, which appear within a users Twitter feed even if they are not following the advertisers account, were introduced in April of last year, and promoted accounts, which appear as the first suggestion of Who to follow along the right side of a users home page, were introduced in October 2010. Both of those features operate on a bidding system, where advertisers bid to have their tweets or account names appear on users Twitter home pages. Promoted trends, which appear slightly farther down the right side of a users home page, were introduced in June of last year and can be purchased for $120,000 per country per day, Graves said. According to Graves, targeting on Twitter is done by a few factors, including which accounts and national campaigns a user already follows, any lists the user is on and the self-reported content of a users profile, such as describing oneself as a political junkie. Graves said that a benefit of the promoted content on Twitter is its placement within the site.

These are just normal tweets, he said of the material that appears either within a users Twitter feed or directly alongside it. Theyre appearing where people expect them to appear. Although its not accessible to Congressional offices just yet, people are already looking forward to the continued opening of promoted content on Twitter. I think its fantastic, Jacobs said, explaining that, in his experience, Twitters setup encourages users to leave the site to consume outside content more than Facebooks does. People are much more accustomed to click links on Twitter that take them off Twitter, he said. Jacobs also pointed to the placement of advertising on Twitter. Ad placement is much more advantageous than Facebook, he said, citing studies that show how users read websites. Typically, he said, users read more of the top of a website and less as they scroll down. Twitter advertising is much more mobile-friendly than Facebook advertising, he added. But whether youre in office or running for one, using Google AdWords or Facebook, or waiting patiently to hop on the Twitter bandwagon, strategists often stress the importance of tailoring online advertising strategies to the race. Every race, every candidate, every district is different, Donehue said. All Facebook: Debates Help Gingrich Catch Up in Facebook Race http://allfacebook.com/facebook-debates-newt-gingrich_b70168 Jennifer Moire December 12, 2011 Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is leading in the polls yet lags in the race for more Facebook fans. Gingrich is turning that around, slowly but surely, according to our own Election Tracker. Saturdays ABC News Yahoo debate should help: It was the most watched of the GOP primary season. Here are the gainers and losers this week in Facebook fans among Republican presidential hopefuls.

Newt Gingrich ranks fifth in the Republican field in total Facebook fans with 211,573. The former Speaker of the House is bested by a candidate whos already out of the race Herman Cain, who still maintains 394,000 fans. Gingrich grew his Facebook fan base by 10,000 last week, while he leads in most national and early primary state polls. Gingrich added 1,500 fans within 24 hours of the most watched GOP debate of the year. The presidential candidates adding the most Facebook fans this week? President Barack Obama bests them all, adding 29,729 fans in the last seven days, followed by Ron Paul with 12,362 fans, Gingrich, then Mitt Romney who added more than 8,400 fans. Despite trailing in most polls, Mitt Romney still leads the pack of GOP presidential contenders in Facebook fans, with more than 1.2 million, followed by Ron Paul with 620,529 and Michele Bachmann with 458,950.

Given some Facebookers reaction to Gingrich following the debate a few of which are pasted below maybe the social network just isnt his platform.

Will Newt Gingrich continue to pick up momentum on Facebook as voting in the GOP presidential primary draws nearer?

Washington Post: Campaigns Harness Social Media Graphs for Cash http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/post/campaigns-harness-social-media-graphs-forcash/2011/12/08/gIQAXI1ZfO_blog.html Emi Kolawole December 8, 2011 The days of rubber chicken campaign dinners are not behind us yet. But they have an increasingly powerful digital counterpart: social media fundraising platforms. Barack Obama harnessed the power of his supporters social graphs in 2008 to create an unprecedented momentum when it came to online political fundraising. The 2012 Obama campaign, likely to produce the first billion-dollar-candidate, has a custom-built, online fundraising platform. But that doesnt mean lesserknown candidates with smaller campaign budgets should feel left out of the high-stakes, social media fundraising race. Why not? Just ask Fundly CEO Dave Boyce, who presented the Palo Alto-based companys past successes, which include a 2011 Pollie Award for best Facebook application, and expectations for the 2012 election. (Full disclosure: Washington Post Co. Chairman and chief executive Donald E. Graham is a member of Facebook's board of directors.) Bundlers, money bombs, e-mail campaigns, Facebook campaigns and general online donations are all possible with Fundly, which offers its services for nonprofits, including educational institutions and, of course, political campaigns. How big of a player is Fundly? The company has, to date, funneled over $230 million through its system for large and small donors alike and has secured $8.2 million in funding with its investor list including Kapor Capital, Correlation Ventures and Accelerator Ventures among others. Fundly competitors include Crowdrise, Razoo and Rally. During his presentation, Boyce unveiled the Fundly Political Index, a chart depicting the social fundraising activity on Fundly, using Jan. 1, 2011 as a baseline. Because we have enough of a share of the social fundraising volume, we think that we can provide insight into the velocity of social fundraising that, in this 2012 cycle, will be more than weve ever seen before, Boyce said. The index rates social fundraising on a four-week average, and the company plans to continue the rating system through the 2012 election. According to Fundlys findings, social fundraising is 13 times more active today than it was in January, with the peak of the cycle occurring in the third quarter at 44 times more activity than at the beginning of the year. Activity fell off in the summer months, but social fundraising was still slightly less than six times more active than Jan. 1 at its lowest. This election cycle will definitively be the most social of any election cycle that weve seen, said Boyce, going on to cite the exponential growth of Facebook.

In the 2008 election cycle, Obama raised half-a-billion dollars online. I think each of the presidential nominees will do that and more, said Boyce. He went on to predict over $1 billion in online fundraising in the 2012 cycle, saying that there should be no air between a campaigns online fundraising strategy and its social strategy. Separating the two, according to Boyce makes a campaign smell like 2002. Back then, said Boyce, The transaction was the thing. With social, the transaction is just the beginning. Social media fundraising users are able to create profiles that broadcast their support for a particular organization or candidate while giving other users an opportunity to donate and/or create their own profiles. Individual giving can quickly gain momentum, since individual donors can bring their social networks along with them when they donate something that was not possible when voters mailed in a check or shared their credit card information in a single transaction. The system, argues Boyce, is merely a digital translation of the core concept behind fundraising. People ask people to give. Isnt that how all fundraising works? Yes. Its how its always worked. It has always been a social activity. Asked what role Fundly may have played in the momentum of Herman Cain, who suspended his campaign on Dec. 3. I dont know what role we played, said Boyce, I will admit I was surprised at how vocal his supporters were online and almost every donation resulted in a solicitation from that donor. They wanted to wear it on their sleeve. I dont know if thats cause or effect. The Hill: Republican Field Woos Cains Facebook Fans http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/197461-gop-candidates-look-to-lure-cains-facebook-fans Brendan Sasso December 6, 2011 Republican White House hopefuls are courting Herman Cain supporters on Facebook following Cain's decision to suspend his presidential campaign. Texas Gov. Rick Perry posted a picture on his Facebook page on Sunday of himself standing next to Cain. The text on the image declared the candidates "Both Washington outsiders," and urged, "Cain supporters: Join Team Perry." "With Herman Cain suspending his campaign, I am truly the only Washington outsider left in the race," Perry wrote in the caption. "Encourage your friends who supported Herman to head to http://www.rickperry.org/cain to learn more and join my campaign." Although Perry has been the most direct in trying to win "likes" from Cain's Facebook fans, the other candidates have also turned to the social network in their bid to lure Cain supporters. Newt Gingrich wrote in a Facebook post, "I know from having worked with [Cain] for more than a decade he will continue to be a powerful voice in the conservative movement for years to come." Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson wrote, "I have no doubt Herman Cain will remain a significant voice in the dialogue about the many important issues we face. His rejection of business-as-usual in Washington has been a valuable part of this campaign, and clearly resonates with a great many Americans."

"Herman Cain's campaign was one of ideas," Mitt Romney said. "His announcement today was based on what was best for him and his family. We wish Herman and Gloria the very best." With 395,609 fans, Cain is the fourth most popular GOP candidate on Facebook. Mitt Romney is first with 1,207,410 fans, Ron Paul is second with 611,832, and Michele Bachmann is third with 485,900. Gingrich, who has topped some recent polls, has 205,078 fans. ClickZ: Perry Looks to Lasso Cain Supporters with Facebook Ads http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/2130258/perry-looks-lasso-cain-supporters-facebook-ads Kate Kaye December 5, 2011 As the dwindling field of Republican presidential hopefuls aims to win over former Herman Cain supporters, Rick Perry wants to wrangle them on Facebook. Until now, Perry's campaign has done little online advertising. But ads and messaging seen today on Facebook suggest his campaign sees value in locating Cain supporters there in the hopes of winning them over to his flock. Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich - another candidate whose campaign has shown little interest in online advertising thus far - is trying to capture Cain backers and others on Google. Ads in Google search results that link to the "Meet Newt" page on his campaign site read, "Cain is Out Support Newt." The Perry ads on Facebook speak directly to Cain fans, too. "Cain Supporters: Texas Governor Rick Perry is the only Washington outsider left in the Presidential race. Click to learn more." However, while the Gingrich ads link to a generic page, Perry's ads link to RickPerry.org/Cain, and portray Perry as a "Washington Outsider," just like Cain. "Herman Cain's appeal was that of a Washington Outsider - someone not beholden to the entrenched Beltway interests, and who hasnt spent his life cutting deals at the expense of conservative principles. As the race goes forward, with the Iowa Caucuses 32 days away, I am truly the only Washington Outsider left in the race," notes the Perry site. A post to Perry's Facebook account displays an image featuring Cain and Perry, and also plays on the Texas Governor's arguable outsider status. "Cain supporters: Join Team Perry," it declares. Perry is also using Facebook ads to drive people to his new faith-centric TV spot on YouTube. The Perry camp has been employing the anti-Washington "outsider" rhetoric for a month or so, around the same time that Gingrich - a man with extensive experience in Washington as former speaker of the house began his surge in the polls. It remains to be seen whether Perry, himself a career politician who has held statewide offices in Texas for over two decades, can convince primary voters that he and Cain are truly alike as outsiders.

All Facebook: Gingrichs Facebook Popularity Rises as GOP Race Shifts http://allfacebook.com/newt-gingrichs-facebook-popularity-rises-as-gop-race-shifts_b69272 Jennifer Moire December 5, 2011

The twists and turns in the Republican presidential primary race gave plenty for Facebookers to talk about over the weekend, as a new poll shows Newt Gingrich leading the pack in a key early caucus state. Former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Gingrich now has the most support among the GOP in a Des Moines Register poll, with 25 percent of likely caucus goers in Iowa, followed by Representative Ron Paul of Texas with 18 percent and Governor Mitt Romney in third place with 16 percent. The Iowa caucus the first in the nation is scheduled for January 3. As Gingrichs poll numbers rise, his Facebook fan base is growing as well. Our Election Tracker 2012 shows that Gingrich has added 12,425 fans in the past seven days, and more than 1,800 today alone. With more than 201,555 Facebook fans total, Gingrich still falls behind three other GOP hopefuls in terms of Facebook fan base size: Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul and Mitt Romney. Former Massachusetts Governor Romney leads the GOP in Facebook fans, with more than 1.2 million. With Herman Cain suspending his campaign this weekend, it will be interesting to see how many of the business executives fans throw their Facebook support (and votes) to Gingrich. According to Gingrich, his meteoric rise in the polls is due in part to a new style of campaigning, a substance-based, volunteer-centered, Internet-based, system, according to the new e-book, Rise of the Right. Facebook is key for Gingrich, who hasnt had the staff or money that the other candidates have enjoyed to build a strong state staff or advertise on TV. In a Patch story out of Iowa, Drake University instructor Chris Snider believes there is a correlation between the candidates with the strongest social media presence and those that are leading in the polls. For example, Newt Gingrich is running away from the other candidates on Twitter, with more than 1.3 million followers. And Mitt Romney and Ron Paul have the most Facebook fans among the GOP presidential hopefuls, and they follow Gingrich in the latest poll. Snider also says that going viral is key, citing Ron Pauls campaign as an example. They asked fans to change their Facebook profile picture to a photo of Ron Paul for a day. Do you think Facebook and other social media will influence the results in the Iowa caucus? Des Moines Globe Gazette: Networking New and Old Key to Mobilizing Supporters for Candidates http://globegazette.com/news/local/networking----new-and-old---/article_8858deb0-1ecf-11e1-a88a0019bb2963f4.html Rod Boshart December 4, 2011 DES MOINES - Advances in technology and social media have the 2012 presidential race churning at 140 characters per tweet, but Iowa political experts say a hybrid mix of networking old and new will be key in mobilizing the foot soldiers that candidates will need to perform well in the Jan. 3 GOP caucuses and beyond.

Cutting-edge tools like smart phones, electronic tablets, laptops, Twitter, blogs, YouTube and Facebook used to communicate campaign messages, raise money, deliver mass-blast emails, deploy damage control, and conduct organizational operations in the trenches are dramatically reshaping the way "real time" political races are being run in Iowa and leveling the playing field for candidates with limited financial resources. "It's completely rewriting the playbook," said Steve Grubbs, a Davenport political consultant who managed Republican Herman Cain's presidential campaign in Iowa up until the Georgia businessman suspended his 2012 bid Saturday afternoon. "I would say that a combination of the social media world and the debates have changed the way voters choose their candidates." Anyone who signs up as a Facebook friend with a political campaign is likely to receive three or four messages a day, said West Des Moines Republican Mary Kramer, a former Iowa Senate president and U.S. ambassador to Barbados who is backing Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential bid. "Suffice to say we can stipulate that social media has become an absolutely essential part of many campaigns," said Butch Ward of the Poynter Institute, who cited data that 132 million Americans will use Facebook this year, an average of 190 million daily "tweets" were shipped on Twitter last May, and Pew Project for the States research found that 35 percent of social networking platform users (21 percent of online adults) used the sites for political reasons in 2010. While the organizational power of social networking in targeting a message and raising campaign money became painfully evident to Iowa Republicans during Barack Obama's successful 2008 presidential bid, they also saw the value of going old school during Mike Huckabee's ascent in the state's lead-off precinct caucuses four years ago - a come-from-nowhere victory that was fueled by little-noticed networks of church Bible groups, home-schooling parents, anti-abortion and single-issue activists, constitutionalists, and evangelical conservatives who united under his presidential banner. "The Huckabee people - it was all networking and it wasn't necessarily social networking," said Tim Albrecht, a GOP activist currently serving as Gov. Terry Branstad's press secretary who worked for Romney's Iowa campaign four years ago. "Romney ran the traditional campaign with the phone banking and the ads and the mailers, but ultimately it was the networking of the Huckabee supporters that proved successful on caucus night. They organized themselves. "They are work horses. Home-school groups helped propel George W. Bush in 2004. They packed phone banks to help get him elected. They did the same thing on behalf of Mike Huckabee, really kind of organically and on their own," Albrecht added. "Like-minded people tend to flock together and they all got behind Mike Huckabee. Without those networks, the nation would never have been introduced to Mike Huckabee." Those are the networks - along with Tea Party activists - that GOP candidates like Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and, to some degree, Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich hope to tap, but so far Iowa conservatives in the Republican camp have not unified behind one candidate with one month remaining until they travel to their 1,784 local precincts to start the process of selecting their 2012 presidential nominee to face Obama. "There are so many of us, and I include myself in that, there are so many of us who are still authentically undecided," said Bob Vander Plaats, a three-time gubernatorial candidate who led Huckabee's 2008 Iowa campaign and now serves as chief of the Pleasant Hill-based Family Leader organization. "If those of us who live and breathe this every day are still authentically undecided amongst what I would consider four really

good candidates, maybe more, I've got to believe 80-plus percent of Iowans are still fluid. This is very, very unusual." Eric Woolson, who currently manages Bachmann's Iowa campaign and held a similar post for Huckabee four years ago, said he believes Iowans won't make their final choices until the final week leading up to the caucuses. The closing month includes televised debates in Des Moines on Saturday and Sioux City on Dec. 15. "We've seen more up and down moves in the polls this year I think than any year that I can remember and I think it's going to be a case where we're going to see four or five more twists and turns between now and Jan. 3," he said. Vander Plaats said the other "networking" that has and will continue to influence the political process this election cycle is the network-televised candidate debates and the role that Fox News network in particular has played in covering presidential candidates. Those forums have aided Gingrich, Romney and Bachmann, while hurting Perry and others who have stumbled in the camera's glare. Public-opinion polls have captured snapshots of the race, but often the picture is blurred and several candidates have suffered from overexposure as media, bloggers and others drill down into their positions and pasts. Given the interactive nature of campaigning, real-time tweeting during live debates and the volume of information moving in the "blogosphere," political candidates have technology advisors and social media coordinators to constantly monitor the Internet to identify and correct whatever negative or misinformation emerges. "It's gotten to the point where campaigns have multiple people monitoring the situation so they can quickly correct it," Albrecht said. "It's not enough to just put up a web site any more because you're engaging in hand-to-hand combat in real time now via Twitter and Facebook. Whereas 20, 30 years ago, you had a 24hour news cycle, but now it's a 140-character news cycle and you'd better be ready and you'd better have your people on Twitter sharing the views that you need to get out there. "But, ultimately, nothing beats a good candidate," he added. "You can have all the networks in the world, but if you're not a good candidate, then it's not going to matter on caucus night." Also, Albrecht said the most effective campaign tool remains personal contact, noting that he got involved in politics due to the impression he got as an elementary school student when candidates like presidential Pat Robertson, Bob Dole and Vice President George Bush visited his western Iowa hometown of Ida Grove during the 1988 caucus race. "I still get that thrill when a candidate comes through," he said. "When you have that kind of exposure in a tiny town of 2,400, you don't forget that." Woolson agreed that a personal appearance by a candidate or having someone you know from your church, a social or civic organization, a friend or a relative at a holiday event make a pitch for support trumps social media messaging. "That's what closes the deal," he said. "Not a lot of voters are going to say I'm going to support candidate A or candidate B because I received a mass-blast email from them.' " Albrecht said campaigning in Iowa is still about the traditional network of phone banks, mailers, paid media advertising and having precinct captains selling their candidate to other caucus participants on Jan. 3, and

the test of the new evolving social media and electronic tools is scored by the campaigns that utilize them most effectively. "A lot of the social media is talked about and it's kind of the shiny new toy in the room," he said. "However, if you have a shiny, brand new car but it doesn't have a good engine underneath the hood, all you have is a good-looking car but it doesn't do you much good." ClickZ: Groups Make Crusader Elizabeth Warren Facebook Poster Child http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/2129852/crusader-elizabeth-warren-facebook-poster-child Kate Kaye December 2, 2011 The Democratic Party, MoveOn - and even progressive cause-based telecom service provider Credo - have made Senate hopeful and consumer protection crusader Elizabeth Warren an online poster child. Democrats and liberals inside and outside Massachusetts are seeing the face of Warren grace Facebook ads for groups hoping to harness the momentum behind the candidate, who is looking to unseat Republican incumbent Scott Brown in that state. Like Brown during his much-watched run in the 2010 special election for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, Warren's candidacy has garnered national status. So, it may come as no surprise that organizations like the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, a natural supporter, as well as Credo Action, are glomming on to Warren's charm in their online ads. Both organizations feature Warren in Facebook ads currently running and appear to be targeting supporters of left-leaning groups and causes. Even before her run for office, Warren became a symbol for people supporting increased government oversight of financial institutions. She was instrumental in the establishment of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, founded earlier this year to help guard Americans from predatory lending and other shady financial business practices. The DSCC ads launched a couple weeks ago, according to Shripal Shah, DSCC press secretary. A goal is to combat ads from Crossroads GPS, a group associated with Republican strategist Karl Rove that launched around the same time. "Don't let Karl Rove's group smear Elizabeth Warren," state the Facebook ads. "Join the DSCC and demand a stop to their false attack ads." The ads should run for a few more weeks, said Shah. They link to a petition with a related message on the DSCC site. Meanwhile, Credo, a telecom firm that supports liberal causes, is also hoping to bask in Warren's warm glow. The firm's advocacy arm is running Facebook ads encouraging people to "Sign our thank-you note to Elizabeth Warren. Thank her for standing up for progressive values, and for showing Democrats how to fight!" MoveOn has also featured Warren in email messages linking to petitions and donation pages, as well as in Facebook posts such as a post praising her for suggesting that successful entrepreneurs "take a hunk of [their profits] and pay forward for the next kid who comes along." In its November 27 Facebook post about the statement, MoveOn wrote, "Hands down, this is one of our most widely shared pieces of the year. If it's new to you, keep it going!"

Why Warren? For one, the DSCC, Credo, and MoveOn all want to build up their supporter - or potential customer - bases. And the fact that she is a national, almost iconic figure only helps in generating a strong response from progressives and Democrats across the country. The Warren ad theme also represents a somewhat rare occurrence in politics in which outside groups see value in running positive messages in support of a candidate, rather than going negative. POLITICO: New Voting Tech Innovations for 2012 http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1111/69402.html Mackenzie Weinger November 30, 2011 Election officials are going high-tech for the 2012 election season from iPads to online voting to a social media blitz like never before. Ahead of Nov. 6, states are making innovative changes to make it easier to cast ballots and get information about where, when, and how to vote. On tap for next year: secretaries of state offices are set to carve out a larger presence on Facebook and Twitter, roll out pilot programs offering voters the chance to do everything from marking their ballot on a tablet to finding a polling place on a smartphone app, and allow expanded online voting for some in the military or living overseas. In Oregon, where disabled residents used iPads to cast ballots during a pilot test for the special election earlier this month, officials say they are ready to deploy the tablets again in January. And the states step forward could very well spark a trend: the secretary of states office told POLITICO that Washington state, Idaho, California, West Virginia and Johnson County, Kansas have all contacted Oregon about the use of the iPads for voting. There are also new programs on tap for the back end in Long Beach, Calif., for example, officials will track the citys polls and their contents with radio frequency identification chips, a kind of high-tech barcode. Throughout election night, the location of the polls and whether the results there have been reported will light up on a bingo-type board and show if the ballot boxes are securely in transit or scanned and at the dropbox center, City of Long Beach clerk Larry Herrera said. And in Connecticut, where election officials must contend with a stringent post-election audit, high-speed scanners at about $100,000 a piece will likely be used in 2012 and allow the state to read and count 10,000 ballots every fifteen minutes. The new scanners would mean a big change for the state, where officials have previously had to do the tally by hand, town by town, Secretary of State Denise Merrill said. But for most voters around the country, theyll encounter the newest innovations in the voting world before even heading to the polls in 2012. There are 11 states Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Washington that currently or will shortly offer online voter registration, said Brennan Center for Justices Voting Technology Project director Lawrence Norden and U.S. Election Assistance Commission spokesperson Jeannie Layson. North Carolina is considering implementing it as well. In 2010, eight states provided the service to all their voters. The option is slowly picking up steam, as election officials say it will cut down on problems with handwriting and last-minute registrations that miss the mail-in deadline.

And even more states are turning to the Internet to bombard potential voters with information on Facebook, smartphone apps and Twitter. By joining up on social media sites 21 secretaries of state offices have Facebook pages and close to 30 are now on Twitter officials say theyre hoping to spread the word on important dates and deadlines, and maybe even give voting that elusive cool factor that could help increase participation. In Washington where the elections office has long partnered with Microsoft, whose headquarters is located in the state Facebook is also joining in to boost the states already high-tech elections operation. Next year, users will likely be able to access Washington states online voter registration tool through a tab on the popular social networking site. Facebook is looking for a way to link in or tie in our online voter registration service with Facebook and use the advantages Facebook offers to get the social aspect of registering to vote and telling friends they registered to vote online, Washington co-director of elections Shane Hamlin told POLITICO. Microsoft is doing the tech work of developing the connection between our online registration tool and Facebook. For Seminole County, Floridas supervisor of elections Mike Ertel said Facebook offers a new way to target voters and get information out. This election season, hell be designing his own Facebook ads to reach residents living in the right geographic area and those that update their status with key words that could likely mean they are qualified voters for the county. Its target marketing on steroids, Ertel said. And 35 states have partnered with Pew Center on the States to use the tools the center and its partners are building and developing to pump up voter technology for 2012. The three main tools Pew is rolling out next year are an app to help military and overseas voters fill out their Federal Write-in Absentee Ballot, a multilingual polling place locator, and an expansion of their existing smartphone app to make it available on more platforms. The app currently offers information on how to register to vote and where to find polling places, but it doesnt account for all of the states signed on to the project or work on any other platform but the iPhone. Pew Center on the States senior associate Matthew Morse said the center has one major goal in particular with its updated app they plan to make it a one stop shop for voting in 2012 with links to states online registration portals and other information people will need to know how to get to the polls and vote. Theyre planning to expand the apps functionality to work with other platforms and add in all the details from the new states that recently joined Pew. On the new write-in ballot tool, overseas voters will receive a PDF with a drop-down menu prepopulating their ballot with all the available candidates and offices. This new process, Pews director of election initiatives David Becker said, will likely benefit voters who might have limited access to information on all the candidates, as well as those with bad handwriting. And with the redistricting, its going to be particularly difficult for people, especially those overseas, to know who their congressperson is, what district theyre in, Becker told POLITICO. This tool could be particularly useful in enfranchising them in the 2012 election. While online voter registration looks set to be the next big thing in elections, casting a ballot on the Internet is an idea still rife with controversy. West Virginia and Washington state have so far taken the biggest leaps forward in online voting. West Virginia ran a pilot program in 2010 allowing some military and overseas

voters to test out returning ballots online and Washington is set to permit its roughly 52,000 voters abroad to do so in 2012. We got through the legislature in this last session a bill that would allow us to not only email ballots which we have been doing since the 90s but also allow military and overseas citizens to return their ballots by email, just in individual contact between them and their county office, Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed said. Were enthused about it, as we have a large military population in the state. As more states work to comply with the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act of 2009 a law that attempts to make voting easier and quicker by sending blank ballots overseas electronically election experts say voters in the future may confront a very different voting experience than popping into a poll booth. Its kind of the wild west out there, elections expert and MIT professor Charles Stewart said. Online voting wont be available to most citizens anytime soon, experts told POLITICO, citing concerns with security, hacking and other technology risks. Election watchers particularly cite the2010 internet-based voting test in Washington, D.C., as a major impediment to making the jump in the near future: the system was completely hacked within 36 hours and officials promptly scrapped the whole program. Going to electronic voting over the Internet is an inherently risky proposition, Alexander Shvartsman of the University of Connecticut Center for Voting Technology Research added. I would not recommend that for any political election where the outcome is important. While that technology may not be ready just yet for its big debut, states and businesses are already delving into its other prospects as the next frontier in voting innovation. Lori Steele of Everyone Counts, the company behind both West Virginias online pilot project and Oregons iPad voting technology, said shes confident that in 2013 and beyond there will be a dramatic adoption of software-based voting. The states trying to provide secure and accessible electronic ballots will be using systems such as ours, Steele said. We would never suggest electronic mail because emails not really secure. Depending on the jurisdiction, you would either print it and mail it back or email it or fax it back, depending on the law. Or, in the cases of those who were looking for most secure way, submit it through our electronic ballot return system that would encrypt the ballot and keep it secure until it was ready to be downloaded and counted. For West Virginias Secretary of State Natalie Tennant, the push for online voting for military servicemembers is personal. Among those who could be voting abroad in the future is Tennants husband, state Sen. Erik Wells, who is currently on active duty in Afghanistan with the Navy. All Facebook: Newt Gingrich Turns to Facebook After Endorsement http://allfacebook.com/newt-gingrich-turns-to-facebook-after-endorsement_b68373 Jennifer Moire November 28, 2011 Former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich has taken to Facebook to defend and promote his record in Congress following a major endorsement yesterday by the New Hampshire Union Leader newspaper. The endorsement comes more than 30 days ahead of the New Hampshire presidential primary.

Through Facebook, Gingrich has a platform to share the details of his 21st Century Contract for America, a revised version of the famous Contract for America that he drafted when the Republicans took over the House of Representatives and he was elected Speaker in 1994. Gingrich has also added new applications to his Facebook page in the last week, including a Wayin Debates section, following the recent GOP presidential primary debate on foreign policy. According to our 2012 Election Tracker, the endorsement by New Hampshires only statewide newspaper, along with Gingrichs recent debate performances, are reflected in a steady rise in his Facebook fan base. The former speaker has added nearly 12,500 new fans in the last seven days, and almost 1,500 in the past 24 hours. While Mitt Romney leads in overall fans among the GOP presidential contenders, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich have all held the top spot in overall fan page growth at some point in the past 10 days. Do you think the GOP presidential candidates are leveraging Facebook effectively? All Facebook: GOP Contender Newt Gingrich Doubles Facebook Fans http://allfacebook.com/facebook-elections-2_b67000 Jennifer Moire November 15, 2011 The shuffling of the leaderboard in the Republican presidential primary race continues to affect the candidates popularity on Facebook. According to our Election Tracker, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is doubling his daily number of new Facebook fans, following a pair of strong debate showings last week. His gain may come at the collapse of former pizza company executive Herman Cain. Cains Facebook fan base has dropped from a high of 7,000 fans to just 2,000 daily fans, as his candidacy is plagued by allegations of sexual harassment and a bumbling debate reply on Libya. Heres the breakdown: Gingrich has had more than 8,700 new fans in the past week, for a grand total of more than 170,000 likes on his page. He has averaged about 1,500 new fans each day in the past week. While Herman Cain still has a much larger Facebook fan base, numbering more than 375,000, his momentum on Facebook appears to be stalling given the drop in new fans he is accumulating each day. The Republican hopefuls still cant lay a glove on President Barack Obamas solid Facebook showing. President Obamas campaign fan page has more than 24 million likes, and he has added nearly 100,000 fans in the past week, and almost 13,000 today alone. What do these results tell us in terms of predicting the election that is one year away? Nothing official. However, the GOP candidates with strong Facebook showings still appear to be polling well. An Iowa poll out today shows Cain, Romney, Gingrich and Paul all in a four-way tie for first. All four candidates still have a strong overall Facebook fan base.

Which candidate are you supporting on Facebook? AdAge: Elections Will Turn on Which Candidates Use Social Sharing Most Effectively http://m.adage.com/article?articleSection=digitalnext&articleSectionName=DigitalNext&articleid=http%3A% 2F%2Fadage.com%2Fdigitalnext%2Fpost%3Farticle_id%3D230816 Burbaksh Chahal November 4, 2011 Eighty percent of House and Senate members have social-media accounts, according to the Associated Press. That's 5% more than among millennials -- the key demographic of 18-29 year olds. Even more surprising, Congress has adopted Twitter far more widely than any other group recently surveyed by Pew Research: 81 percent of the House and Senate's 433 members use the platform, as against only 18 percent of 18-29 yearolds. With a presidential election approaching next year, the question is, what will politicians do with these tools? How will President Obama capitalize on the fact that 23 million-plus people "like" his Facebook page? How will Mitt Romney reach new voters via his more than 93,000 Twitter followers? Politicians have the tools in place, but can they use them effectively? The most successful candidates will use social-media sharing at every step of their campaigns. This is not just about the swapping of virtual campaign buttons on Facebook, which the Obama campaign promoted in 2008. It means engaging communities of likely supporters in conversations across the Web -- on every possible device. This campaign cycle will not be about clicks, but targeted communications that can be messaged instantly, based on real-time information. Step One: Build a Constituency By using today's sophisticated ad networks to understand early supporters' online sharing patterns, political campaigns can spread not only targeted ads, but content that recipients will likely want to circulate peer-topeer. It is vital to use the entire open Web; only about a third of sharing is happening on Twitter and Facebook. Step Two: Create Momentum, Drive Discussion Campaigns are long roads with many stages and twists; a media darling today may be road kill tomorrow. Candidates need to micro-target their base via a steady drumbeat of news, events and opinions focused on what the specific audience wants to hear. They can track in real time how recipients react to their news and that of their competitors, using sophisticated ad-network tools to see how much of it they share -- or don't share. Social media is all about word of mouth. It's key to share only the most relevant information with each constituent group. They'll be more likely to "share" links to content explicitly designed for them.

While hyperlinking to everything and anything can help spread the word, campaigns should avoid spray-andpray advertising. It's much more efficient to track and capitalize on social interactions as they are happening. We share things that we have a vested interest in, are personal and are relevant to our friends. Calls to action should be part of the package; supporters want to help -- and to act.

But a word of warning: don't expect voters to automatically click on ads. People don't click unless they're given a strong reason to do so, such as a sharing option. Consumers want information they can easily share and view without going somewhere else - all from within an ad. Step Three: The Home Stretch Calls to action are most important in a campaign's final days and hours. The social web can help get the vote out in ways never before possible -- with tweeters checking in from various polling stations, for example, or interactive get-out- the-vote display ads. Phone banking and street-sign waving can't compete with the scale of that type of sharing. Now or Never Studies show that both major political parties' use of social media is neck-and-neck. Which will execute better and emerge as the people's choice will undoubtedly come down to which campaign understands sharing best. Tech President: The Frictionless Grassroots, Part 1 http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/backchannel-%E2%80%94-frictionless-grassroots-part-1 Chuck DeFeo November 3, 2011 When Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook is actively using the open graph to encourage a new form of frictionless sharing, there was the usual variety of reactions that tend to happen with Facebook product announcements from the giddiness of a shiny new toy, the inquisitiveness of marketers evaluating the potential, and the usual outrage of privacy advocates. Zuckerberg discussed at a minimal level the impact this could have on several media industries such as music, books, news, movies, television, etc., but I have yet to read a discussion of what this could mean for grassroots activism around a cause or a candidate. So what is frictionless sharing? Simply put, after initial permission is given by an individual, Facebook and the app they are using can share an individuals actions with their friends on Facebook in real time or in aggregate at a later time. This sharing on Facebook can happen in the news feed, ticker, or notifications. An example that was rolled out with Facebooks announcement is the Washington Posts social reader that is an app inside Facebook. When I read an article inside the Posts Facebook app, it is posted to my timeline, displayed to my friends who are also using the app that I read that article and an aggregate of the articles I read is placed in the newsfeed for my Facebook friends to see. Other sites like Yahoo News reader have embedded this Facebook functionality and experience into their website. As Facebook continues to propel us into a society of personal sharers -- who we are as individuals or possibly who we would like people to see us as is becoming more accessible. This level of transparency and connectivity is a marketers and a grassroots organizers dream come true. Now with our actions (not just our active, conscious choice to Like something) we will be publicly endorsing an artist, a television show, product ... and candidate or cause. The scope of communication expands once again and just as importantly the depth of commitment to that product or cause is going to be better measured. Liking a brand page is one level of support, continually engaging with that brand and

allowing your engagement to be shared continuously to your Facebook friends will demonstrate a persons passion and level of commitment to that brand. Spotifys relationship with Facebook has the potential to disrupt the music industry as much as the launch of the iPod and iTunes had roughly a decade ago. Why does it represent that level of disruption? Because it returns us to the social and emotional experience that for the decades prior to earbuds was so important to the music industry: real-time sharing and a shared music experience among friends. Only with Facebook it will become the serendipity of seeing a friend listening to a song and choosing to listen/download that song as a result instead of sitting next each other or sharing a bootleg CD. If Spotify users cotton to using its Facebook app because it makes their music experience social in a better way, older platforms like iTunes may well be in trouble. What is the potential for bringing a similar (not the same but similar) shared social and emotional experience that comes with involvement in a candidate or cause? Seeing a friend listening to a candidate speech, watching an online video, signing a petitionall seamlessly. Imagine an Obama or Republican candidate Facebook app that lets your friends know when youre interacting with the candidates website or in a Facebook app (like the Washington Posts social reader and others) taking an action, and how that might intensify your friends interest in that candidate as a result. Someone not quite paying attention may ask: Why would you want frictionless? Politics is an industry built on friction and contrast. For those paying attention it represents an important opportunity for the 2012 election cycle. It is an opportunity for your best possible surrogates to be on message, spreading your message effortlessly and continuously. Nielsen conducted a study that included questions on the level of trust consumers have in the sources of marketing messages they receive. Seventy-six percent trust -- 18% completely trust -- a recommendation from people (they) know. Only 3% have any level of distrust from what is recommended by people they know, a 73-point differential in favor of word-of-mouth marketing. Search engine text ads, the most common form of reaching people who may be interested in your campaign or cause have a 21% level of trust. Now, as Ogilvys John Bell points out, there is still an important role for advertising as it is the neutral point where companies (or causes) introduce ourselves. In 2012, the campaign that successfully introduces itself most frequently and effectively but from a better starting point of trust through frictionless sharing experiences through Facebook will be the frontrunner in the use of digital media and most likely leading in the polls as well. In my next post, I will discuss what a frictionless campaign could look like and what the potential is for voter engagement at various levels. In the meantime, feel free to share this and start the discussion on what you think it could like and who is best positioned in 2012 to take advantage of open graph. Associated Press: Social Media Companies Friend Politics http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2011-10-15/social-media-politics/50757208/1 Beth Fouhy October 13, 2011 NEW YORK Social media companies have "friended" the 2012 presidential contest at a level almost unimaginable just four years ago, hosting debates and sponsoring presidential town halls while remaining indispensable tools for candidates looking to connect with voters in the digital sphere.

Giants like Facebook and Google cast their involvement as civic engagement, saying they are eager to help facilitate the national political conversation and encourage people to vote. But their stepped-up political presence comes as those companies and others hire lobbyists, form political action committees and nurture their relationships with lawmakers whose policy decisions affect the companies' bottom line. "The exposure being branded as 'the' place to go for social media has huge economic consequences for these companies," said Heather LaMarre, a journalism professor at the University of Minnesota who studies politics and the Internet. "When they appear to be socially active and engaged in democracy, they develop a vast well of good will with the political elites who have the ability to make or break them in the future." Facebook, by far the largest and most influential of the online social networks, formed a PAC this month to make contributions to candidates. The company also spent $550,000 for 21 lobbyists in the first half of this year to help it navigate potential legislative battles over privacy, patent and regulatory issues. That figure is small compared to other media companies of its size, but well on its way to double the $350,000 it spent in all of 2010, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which studies political money and influence. At the same time, Facebook has boosted its visibility in the presidential contest. The company is scheduled to co-host a Republican primary debate in New Hampshire with NBC's Meet the Press show days before that state's first in the nation primary. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg interviewed Obama at the company's Silicon Valley headquarters last April. The company is stocked with political veterans. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, worked for then-Treasury Secretary Larry Summers under President Bill Clinton. The company also recently hired Joel Kaplan, a former domestic policy adviser to Republican President George W. Bush, to head its public policy office in Washington. Showcasing both sides of the political divide has helped Facebook stress its neutrality. "The color of the site is blue, but the color of the company is definitely purple," Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said. Google, the leading Internet search company, has spent $3.5 million on lobbying so far this year while its PAC contributed $345,000 to candidates in 2010. It, too, has become a prominent player in the presidential race, cohosting a GOP primary debate with Fox News in September and planning another with public television and the Des Moines Register before the Iowa caucuses. Paid political advertising on Google, already popular in 2008, surged in 2010 after Republican Scott Brown's strategic use of Google ads helped fuel his upset victory in a special election to replace the late Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy. Google, like Facebook, does not want to be viewed as partisan. "Our products aren't political, it's about connecting voters to information," spokesman Jake Parrillo said. YouTube, the popular video sharing site owned by Google, has also boosted its political profile. The company this week launched a dedicated politics channel where users can watch campaign-related videos and compare candidates' statistics, like which one has the most video views, subscribers and shares. Ramya Raghavan, news and politics manager at YouTube, said viewers can expect candidates to do more live streaming of campaign events on the site and posting episodic content, almost like a television series.

Twitter, barely a player in the 2008 campaign, has become a go-to digital hub for political conversation in 140-character bursts. Obama and all the GOP presidential candidates have Twitter accounts, as do 85 senators and at least 360 House members. Former New York Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner even saw his career unravel over Twitter, after sending a sexually suggestive photo to a woman using the site. Twitter does not lobby yet or have a PAC, but has begun to ramp up its political and policy presence in Washington. The company recently hired Colin Crowell, who recently worked as senior counsel to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, to run its global public policy division. Adam Sharp, a former Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill, has worked with members of Congress to use Twitter more effectively. Twitter recently began to accept paid political advertising, which will appear in users' Twitter feeds with a purple icon that includes information about who purchased the ad. Twitter's political influence was all but cemented in July when Obama sat for a live Twitter town hall at the White House. He began by tweeting a question "In order to reduce the deficit, what costs would you cut and what investments would you keep?" and replied to questions submitted to him through the site. LaMarre of the University of Minnesota noted that a presidential visit to Twitter or Republicans participating in a Facebook-sponsored debate was essentially "picking winners and losers in the industry." She added, "It's not intentional, they're the popular sites and it's where the people are now. But there are hundreds of social networking sites out there. By partnering with the big ones, politicians reinforce these companies as institutions." Sam Weston, a digital communications specialist who has worked in Democratic campaigns, said social network sites were interested in presidential politics as much for the coolness factor as for business reasons. "For all these companies, the primary reason is cultural relevance," Weston said. "This will be one of the most discussed topics of the next year. It makes sense for them as they pursue their own agenda, to be the primary place where people talk about politics." Engage: Tracking the Most Talked About Candidates on Facebook http://www.engagedc.com/2011/10/12/tracking-the-most-talked-about-candidates-on-facebook/ Patrick Ruffini October 12, 2011 At Engage, we (heart) data. We think that Big Data harnessed from the social web can oftentimes better tell us whats happening in real time than a traditional opinion poll. Theres no better test of this than the Republican presidential primary, which seems to yield a new frontrunner every week. Wouldnt it be great to tell in real time, that day, whos up and whos down, based on the worlds biggest platforms for real-time conversation? Last week, Facebook announced the release of its People Talking About metric. For any Facebook page or topic, Facebook will tell you how many people are talking about that topic across the entire site and thats regardless of whether these people like the given page. In your news feed, you may have seen stories aggregating your friends conversation around hot topics like Steve Jobs or the Occupy Wall Street protests.

The results for the Republican candidates for President are revealing, and we plan to track them in this public Google Spreadsheet every day through the primaries. Well periodically post our analysis of what the numbers mean to Twitter and Facebook. Right now, Herman Cain far and away leads the field in Facebook buzz, with nearly 80,000 people talking about him daily. Hes followed by Mitt Romney, whos also been on the rise especially with his endorsement by Chris Christie. A quick note: Any measure of Internet buzz be it tweets, Facebook posts, or searches will reward the most controversial and talked about public figures, and these arent always the highest vote getters. Thats probably why Cain, with his 9-9-9 plan and his recent surge in the polls, leads, and why Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul place strongly. We think that the best way to draw useful conclusions from this is to look at trends as well as the absolute numbers and these trends will become more evident over time. If Cain were to fall below his previous performance while other candidates gained, that would be a sign of trouble. Former frontrunner Rick Perry languishing at around one seventh of Herman Cains current buzz is already not a great sign for his campaign. And Facebook buzz surrounding the entire field of candidates seems to be slowly but surely picking up, but it has a ways to go before it rivals the guy theyre going after: Barack Obama, with a total of 443,882 Facebook users talking about him currently, combined with 199,034 for the Republican field in total. Tech President: Dont Confuse Number of Facebook Fans with Success: Mitt Romney, Herman Cain and Rick Perry http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/dont-confuse-number-facebook-fans-success-mitt-romney-hermancain-and-rick-perry Alan Rosenblatt October 11, 2011 It would be a serious mistake to think that just because Mitt Romney has 1,129,189 million Facebook fans and Rick Perry only has 167,060 fans that Romney is more successful on Facebook than Perry. Meanwhile, the surging Herman Cain has 255,315 fans. There are two key considerations that we must make to make a proper comparison between these two candidates Facebook presence. First, the stark difference in the number of fans each has is directly the result of time. Romney has been building his Facebook presence since he launched his last presidential bid in 2008. That means he has been building a national audience for four years, fueled by enormous press coverage during his 2008 campaign. Perry and Cain, on the other hand, have only been building national Facebook audiences for a few months. Second, focusing on the size of the audience ignores the most important social networking metric, audience engagement. Why? Because each time a fan engages with a candidate on Facebook (by liking, commenting or sharing content on a candidate's page), they send an endorsement of that candidate to their friends via their newsfeed. By liking, commenting, or sharing content from a candidates page, a page visitor (fan or not) is recommending that content to their own friends. This peer to peer referral is far more influential than any candidate to voter messaging because people trust their friends, often above all others. Think about it this way: who are you more likely to believe, a political candidate who is saying everything they can to get elected, or your friend, who you trust because he/she is like you, because you know them, because they

arent a politician. When people post comments to or share candidates wall posts on Facebook they are opening up a conversation with their friends, far more than they are opening a conversation with the candidate. There may be a slight chance that the candidate replies directly to the commenter, but there is a far greater chance that the comment will start a conversation among the commenter and his/her friends. This conversation about a candidate among friends is a significant departure from the historical patterns of voter engagement in electoral campaigns. Prior to the rise of the Internet, generally, and social networks, specifically, most voters waited until the last two weeks before an election to consider their options. But that has changed. By June of 2008, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 46% of Americans had already used the Internet to learn about the candidates. Now, with dramatic increases in the use of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, Americans are also talking with each other about the candidates. 160,000 Perry fans are not just discovering who he is, but they are talking about him with their friends. They are sharing his messages with them and discussing them. This creates a much deeper level of political engagement within the electorate, far in advance of traditional timelines. In order to truly assess the level of success Perry, Cain and Romney are having on Facebook, lets dive into what their fans are doing on their pages. If we look at the numbers, we clearly see that not only fan for fan, but also in absolute terms, Rick Perry is outperforming Mitt Romney in terms of engagement (likes and comments) and the extended reach that produces. Cain outperforms Perry and Romney generating likes on his wall, but lags considerably on comments. Simply scanning the wall posts on their two pages shows that Perry consistently gets 2,000-6,000 likes on his posts, Romney gets 500-6,000 likes per post and Cain get 1,000-12,000 likes per post. Despite having significantly fewer fans, Perry has a slight edge in likes per post over Romney, and Cain does even better. These likes are quick, low-cost hits that alert the friends of the fans liking the candidate. While not as conversation provoking as comments or shares, likes are akin to opening volleys, priming the conversation pump. On many occasions, I have liked a politicians page and quickly received questions on my wall asking me why I liked them. When it comes to comments on posts, though, Perry buries Romney. Romney rarely gets more than a 1,000 comments on a post. Most are in the 300-800 comment range, with a rare flare-up to 1,000 (or 3,000+ in one instance in September). Meanwhile, Perry gets over 1,000 comments on every post and frequently exceeds 3,000 comments on wall posts. Cains wall gets surprisingly few comments compared to the other candidates and, more interestingly, compared to the number of likes he gets. Its like Cains fans are really good at clicking buttons, but not so interested in writing down their ideas. When we consider that the average Facebook user has 130 fans, we can quickly see that Cain and Perry's reach far exceeds the number of fans who like their page. As a result, Perrys fans are generating a lot more conversation than Romneys. Cains fans are generating significantly more buzz than either of his top contenders, but that buzz has far less substance to it. At some point, it is very likely that Perry and Cain will catch up to Romney in total fan/page likes. When that happens, extrapolating his current performance levels, we should expect Perry and Cain to generate many times the level of engagement than Romney, albeit qualitatively different from each others, if we extrapolate their current performance numbers.

So, while we expect to see lots of stories comparing the three GOP frontrunners on social media that point out important similarities and differences (like this one), their focus on total number of fans/page likes misses the primary point of social networks: getting your fans to spread the messages of your campaign and creating conversations and buzz that are driven by YOUR trusted messengers. Tech President: How Campaigns Use of Facebook Data Might Change the 2012 Election http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/how-campaigns-use-facebook-data-might-change-2012-election Nick Judd October 10, 2011 More than in any other race to date, Americans may experience the 2012 presidential election through precisely targeted phone calls, visits, tweets and Facebook posts messages not from the candidates themselves, but from their own politically active friends. If those messages come, they won't be random. As campaigns become more savvy about their data on supporters and voters, they are also becoming more and more sophisticated in the way they plan voter contact. This is already leading to new tools, like one built by NGP VAN and used in an ongoing labor campaign, that don't just encourage users to spread the message of a campaign they help each supporter make a data-driven decision about who to contact. The union-backed We Are Ohio campaign, organizing against changed collective bargaining laws in Ohio, uses a tool built by NGP VAN that serves as a prime example of this kind of strategy. Users who visit the tool, accessible via a web interface, can build a list from among their Facebook friends by logging in with their account. (They can also type names in one at a time.) As they identify people they'd be willing to reach out to, the tool checks an NGP VAN voter database for an existing record of that person's name, phone number and voting status. When the user has a list of the right kinds of people to call, the tool then presents the user with each voter's phone number and a script. "We know that messages coming from your friends or your family are more powerful," Melissa Fazekas, a spokeswoman for We Are Ohio, told me Monday. At We Are Ohio, this tool is called the "friends and family program" and it taps into the personal connections of thousands of supporters, she said. This combines the kind of do-it-yourself action that defined the Obama 2008 campaign in which both NGP and VAN, then separate companies, played a role with the data-powered strategy that may become the defining characteristic of Obama 2012. But it's also a digital version of an analog tactic that's been in place for years, NGP VAN's chief executive officer, Stu Trevelyan, and VAN founder Mark Sullivan told me last week. Sullivan told me that in Iowa in 2006, legislative caucuses would summon as many supporters as they could to sit in front of a computer running VAN's voter file software. The volunteers would check as many names as they could think of against the voter database, and each eligible voter they identified would get a card addressed to them, with their friend's name and return address. "In key legislative races they'd tell the candidate, 'you've got to get everybody you know to come and do this thing,'" Sullivan told me. "Everybody likes telling you how many people they know." This takes that idea and digitizes the entire process, with Facebook integration for good measure. The NGP VAN tool is just a starting point, limited in some sense by Facebook's restrictions on which data about users that applications can keep and how long the data can be stored.

Sullivan says the tool is primarily interesting as "a really strong foundation for a system of delivering Internetbased tasks to groups of users." The same system could ask different portions of an email list to do different things with their friends knock on their doors, for instance. Neither Sullivan or Trevelyan was ready to say that this tool would reappear in its present form on the 2012 campaign trail. But it isn't the only example of campaign software developers starting to think about what could happen when campaigns integrate the data available to them, and it marks the early appearance in the field of a new strategy merging campaign data with the data each supporter keeps about their contacts, stored away in places like Facebook profiles that I expect we'll be seeing more of in the future. This strategy is already starting to spread. Earlier this year, Politico's Michelle Quinn called me to ask about a new tool Votizen built for acting San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee's campaign, which does more or less exactly the same thing that the NGP VAN tool does. In our recent conversation, Trevelyan was focused on NGP VAN's software as part of "the mechanical turkization of politics" but that's a trend that has been burgeoning on the right and the left for years. Again, what's new here is the level of social intelligence going into what the campaign is asking the volunteer to do. And it puts into focus one aspect of an abstract principle we've already spotted. Writing for CNN, techPresident editor Micah Sifry observed in a piece that ran on Sunday that President Barack Obama's re-election campaign will be focused on data, and other candidates would have to do the same if they hoped to compete: For a campaign that tapped the volunteer energies of millions of people in 2008 and appears to need all the help it can get in 2012, these kinds of fine-grained technologies could make a key difference. While the Republican field (and bloggers and the press) has been focused on how their candidates are doing with social networking, Obama's campaign operatives are devising a new kind of social intelligence that will help drive campaign resources where they are most needed. Facebook's role as a data source is not quite what Micah is focused on; he's more interested in the way Obama's data scientists may be determining where the campaign puts boots on the ground, for instance. But on the micro scale, any campaign volunteer or staffer with Facebook on their phone is carrying around a treasure trove of data about their contacts: Almost all of their friends, how often they talk online, what they talk about, even when they go to the same events. Integrate that into the kind of data alchemy that's already going on and it has the potential to change the way campaigns work imagine if those precisely placed campaign door-knock teams were built such that each member was going to be visiting some people they already knew, based on a quick check of their Facebook profiles. It's a given that people are more likely to listen when they're contacted by a friend; using social media in this context is about increasing the number of those personal interactions on a campaign's behalf. It's a new idea, it's just now being tested out, and it's unclear yet if there will be a winning formula for putting it into practice. But the idea is tremendously interesting, and its use in the Ohio campaign to restore collective bargaining rights is an early experiment. After ballot initiative votes are tallied for Ohio's November elections, we'll have a better idea of how it might be used in the 2012 campaigns.

"It's a new technology that's never really been implemented before," Fazekas, of We Are Ohio, told me. Later in the conversation, she added, "the first time you ever really use something you have to work out the kinks." CNN: How Obamas Data-Crunching Prowess May Get Him Re-Elected http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/09/tech/innovation/obama-data-crunching-election/ Micah Sifry October 9, 2011 (CNN) -- In July, KDNuggets.com, an online newsite focused on data mining and analytics software, ran an unusual listing in its jobs section. "We are looking for Predictive Modeling/Data Mining Scientists and Analysts, at both the senior and junior level, to join our department through November 2012 at our Chicago Headquarters," read the ad. "We are a multi-disciplinary team of statisticians, predictive modelers, data mining experts, mathematicians, software developers, general analysts and organizers - all striving for a single goal: re-electing President Obama." The job listing caught the attention of Alex Lundry, a Republican data-mining expert at TargetPoint Consulting. He tweeted a link to the ad, commenting, "The Obama campaign is taking #bigdata seriously; what about the GOP candidates?" The question almost answers itself. So far in the presidential election of 2012, there is only one campaign that is doing cutting-edge work with data. Obama may be struggling in the polls and even losing support among his core boosters, but when it comes to the modern mechanics of identifying, connecting with and mobilizing voters, as well as the challenge of integrating voter information with the complex internal workings of a national campaign, his team is way ahead of the Republican pack. Facebook apps and other tools Alone among the major candidates running for president, the Obama campaign not only has a Facebook page with 23 million "likes" (roughly 10 times the total of all the Republicans running), it has a Facebook app that is scooping up all kinds of juicy facts about his supporters. Users of the Obama 2012 - Are You In? app are not only giving the campaign personal data like their name, gender, birthday, current city, religion and political views, they are sharing their list of friends and information those friends share, like their birthday, current city, religion and political views. As Facebook is now offering the geo-targeting of ads down to ZIP code, this kind of fine-grained information is invaluable. Inside the Obama operation, his staff members are using a powerful social networking tool called NationalField, which enables everyone to share what they are working on. Modeled on Facebook, the tool connects all levels of staff to the information they are gathering as they work on tasks like signing up volunteers, knocking on doors, identifying likely voters and dealing with problems. Managers can set goals for field organizers -- number of calls made, number of doors knocked -- and see, in real time, how people are doing against all kinds of metrics.

In additional to all the hard data, users can share qualitative information: what points or themes worked for them in a one-on-one conversation with voters, for example. "Ups," "Downs" and "Solutions" are colorcoded, so people can see where successes are happening or challenges brewing. And unlike an open social network, where everyone is equal, NationalField runs on a hierarchical social graph: Higher-level staff get a broader view of the state and local work below them. For a campaign that tapped the volunteer energies of millions of people in 2008 and appears to need all the help it can get in 2012, these kinds of fine-grained technologies could make a key difference. While the Republican field (and bloggers and the press) has been focused on how their candidates are doing with social networking, Obama's campaign operatives are devising a new kind of social intelligence that will help drive campaign resources where they are most needed. 'Data harmonization' It all sounds like common sense, but actually, connecting and synchronizing the data a campaign collects from its field operation, fundraising operation and Web operation isn't a trivial task. "The holy grail of data analysis is data harmonization, or master data management," Lundry said. "To have political talking to finance and finance talking to field, and data is flowing back and forth and informing the actions of each other -- it sounds easy, but it's incredibly hard to implement." Most political campaigns tend to rely on consultants to carry out part or all of these functions, resulting in even greater obstacles to sharing information. Like Lundry, Republican technology consultant Martin Avila is worried. His firm, Terra Eclipse, built Ron Paul's 2008 Web operation and works closely with the tea party movement. This year, it did some work on Tim Pawlenty's website until that campaign folded. Avila's flagship project is a conservative social-networking hub called Freedom Connector, which has grown to 150,000 members in a matter of months by giving right-wing activists tools to organize local meetings and discussions. Avila doesn't think any of the Republican presidential campaigns fully understand the power of data today. "They have to stop seeing a website as a piece of direct mail that people will receive," he said. "They have to see a website as the equivalent of a campaign office in Iowa, one that is open 24/7." And campaigns need to know how to take quick and well-targeted action to respond to every expression of interest they may get online, he argues, because voter interest in politicians is fickle. Simply sending a generic e-mail reply isn't enough. "If you can make that initial response a phone call from someone in their town or a neighbor, asking them to come to a county fair tomorrow, that's much more powerful." Power of personal connections Without good data management, the different legs of a national campaign can trip over each other.

"One hand doesn't know what the other hand is doing quite often in campaigns," Lundry said. "With master data management across a campaign, you can see how often you're talking to a person" and thus not bombard them with untimely or poorly targeted requests. But, according to Avila, "Not many on the Republican side know how to technically accomplish that." Their approach to the Web, he adds, is still too much shaped by pre-Internet politicking using broadcast advertising. "The ability to connect to people on a one-to-one basis, and encourage them to connect with one another, is way more powerful than that." How powerful? The 2008 Obama campaign offered an early glimpse of the potential of data-driven politics. By the end of the election, it had amassed 13 million supporter e-mail addresses, collected nearly 4 million individual donations and tallied about 2 million registered users on my.BarackObama.com, the campaign's social networking platform. Seventy thousand myBO members had used the site to conduct their own personalized fundraising campaigns. Since 2008, enthusiasm for Obama has waned, but his online presence hasn't. His base on Facebook has soared nearly six times from the 4 million he had on Election Day, and his following on Twitter now stands at 10 million, dwarfing the Republican field. So even if Obama isn't drawing millions of people off their sofas to rally to his side on their own in 2012, his team has a huge amount of raw data to work with as they build his re-election machine. If the 2012 election comes down to a battle of inches, where a few percentage points change in turnout in a few key states making all the difference, we may come to see Obama's investment in predictive modelers and data scientists as the key to victory. Huffington Post: Why 2012 is Shaping Up to be the Verb Election http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sean-donahue/social-media-presidential-campaign-_b_983182.html Sean Donahue September 28, 2011 Verbs have become powerful enough to shape the presidential race. Facebook's latest changes, while not political in nature, are symbolic of how our world is changing. At its annual F8 developer conference last week, the social-networking pioneer cemented the most influential organizing force in modern political history: the degree to which candidates in next year's election will be required to utilize the full social Web to win the hearts and minds of voters. To be clear, there was no official mention of 2012 or any one political campaign at last week's conference. However, the move by CEO Mark Zuckerberg to make Facebook far more social through features that support "real-time serendipity," the notion that spur-of-the-moment discovery and sharing shapes online experiences, is set to redefine how candidates interact with voters. The clock is ticking and the learning curve has never been steeper. Consider the following: in 2008, Barack Obama amassed more than 100,000 Twitter followers by election day. In 2012, there will be more than 240 million Americans online. To remain competitive, presidential candidates will need to add a few zeros to previous numbers, in terms of fans, friends, subscribers and followers.

50 million will soon be the new normal. While the Internet has been a political tool for more than a decade, it wasn't until Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean's Democratic primary campaign in 2004 that its power to organize and activate became readily apparent. Largely driven by traditional Websites and blogs, the standard four-part "ask" was simple: come, join, donate and vote. Eight years later, a vastly different set of verbs will define which candidate(s) drive the most share of conversation online. And the stakes have never been higher. First, while still a box to be checked, the campaign Website is quickly becoming obsolete. By 2016, it will be as obsolete as the fax machine is today, as pages on social networking sites quickly take over. Traditional websites will simply be storage closets for approved content. In a "word" or "verb" election, the individual word is as important as the message. Keywords lead us to the right places where we can "like," "subscribe," "recommend," "Tweet," or "friend." They lead us to our favorite community sites where we hang out. This is what matters. Today's candidate needs to build their SocialCloud that shares content across the 10 channels of online (video to audio to blogs and more). Candidates expand their supporter networks far faster and more effectively by embracing the vision that Facebook, Google, salesforce.com and many others have built. Those who neglect specific "asks" of their supporters, particularly the need to tap into the full power of social networks, will find themselves at a clear disadvantage when it comes to fundraising, building supporter communities, shaping conversations and, above all, earning votes. Second, the explosion of content -- Tweets, news stories, status updates, videos, photos, podcasts, likes, dislikes, etc. -- will require that candidates at all levels become far more participatory and prescriptive. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, in 2005 only 8 percent of online U.S. adults were using social networking sites. Today 65 percent use them. Said another way, the four key drivers of news flow today are the Facebook Wall, blogs, Twitter and mainstream media. In an increasingly interconnected media environment, never has it been more important to help supporters share and navigate basic content. In 2008, signing up supporters for an e-mail list signified a tactical win. In 2012, tailoring a speech or message to encourage supporters to "share" a blog post or favorable op-ed will become commonplace to ensure that campaigns stay ahead of the content game. When this happens, a post from a highly influential supporter becomes just as useful and important as a front-page story in the New York Times, especially if it's actively re-Tweeted. Finally, those who choose to ignore the social Web will not just be left behind, but will be vastly outnumbered by those who embrace it. The ailing economy, Mideast conflict, market uncertainty and overall dissatisfaction with Washington, all in the midst of the social media revolution, are laying the groundwork for a highly polarized and vocal electorate. Unlike 2008, the opportunities to weigh in with one's opinion or frustration are far greater. This will require that candidates reassess their approach and replace a "boots on the ground" strategy with "fingers on a keyboard" mindset.

Far too often, Washington falls behind the eight ball when it comes to technology adoption. 2012 will be different. Gone are the days when launching a Website and joining a social network was enough. The nation's first "verb" election will require much more. Americans will soon demonstrate what this means. The Hill: Cain Thanks Facebook Friends in Web Video http://thehill.com/video/campaign/184335-cain-thanks-facebook-friends-in-web-video Geneva Sands September 28, 2011 Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain released a Web video Tuesday thanking his "friends" for helping him pass 200,000 "likes" on his Facebook page. "Thank you for being a part of that major milestone. It just goes to re-enforce what I have said that in this campaign the voice of the people is much stronger than the voice of the media and you are a big part of the voice of the people," said Cain in the video. The Facebook "friends" of other GOP candidates vary widely. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has 1,122,682, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann has 461,399 and Texas Gov. Perry had 165,740 "likes" on their presidential campaign Facebook pages as of Thursday morning. Cain, the former CEO of Godfather's Pizza, said the Facebook number is representative of the upward momentum his campaign is experiencing, including rising poll numbers and a surprise win in Florida's straw poll Saturday. "Thank you and let's take the 200,000 to the next level. This is Herman Cain. Love ya and I appreciate your support," says Cain in the end of his video message. Old Dominion Watchdog: Kaine, Allen in Social Media Shootout http://watchdog.org/37470/odw-kaine-allen-in-social-media-shoot-out/ Peter J. Smith September 27, 2011 ALEXANDRIA The two former governors running for U.S. Senate in Virginia know the lay of the land: They can stump, glad hand and drop their gs with the best. What could help decide the dead-even race between Republican George Allen and Democrat Tim Kaine is the ability to reach supporters on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The Kaine campaign uses social networking to spread and control its message in traditional media. Weve found that Twitter and Facebook can be good ways of amplifying your message from other platforms, Kaine campaign spokeswoman Brandi Hoffine said. Twitter was an integral part of our strategy. Rather than announcing his candidacy through traditional news media, Kaine entered the race in March three months after Allen with a single Tweet, Im running! He linked supporters to a YouTube video, followed by a press release and a press conference the next day. The announcement gave way* to 9,217

Twitter followers more than three times Allens 2,887 and more than 23,260 Youtube views 10,000 more than Allen. Kaine pursued the right strategy, said Colin Delany, founder and editor of Epolitics.com, an online site says its work is dissecting the craft of online political advocacy. Twitter users treat the site as a news ticker, and it is no accident the most widely followed tweeters outside of celebrities are reporters, bloggers and activists on the political left and right. If youre trying to influence the public media and opinion leader discussion, Twitter is where you need to be, Delany said. Kaine also has turned Internet hits into dollar signs. At the start of the race the Kaine campaign posted a profile on Act Blue, a liberal fundraising website designed to match small money donors to candidates. He pulled in more than $500,000 from contributors across the country within the first three months of the campaign. But experts say that while George Allen lags behind Kaine in Twitter followers, he has captured the most important lead of all: Facebook fans. Allen knows the perils of social media. He lost the 2006 senate race to Democrat Jim Webb due in part to an off-the-cuff racial remark to a Democrat operative with a video camera. The incident gained traction in the media thanks to YouTube. Instead of shying from the medium in the 2012 race, Allen embraced social media on the online campaign trail. From the outset of this campaign, George Allen wanted to make effective use of every communication tool available to reach people, said Bill Riggs, Allens campaign spokesman. The goal, Riggs said, is to carry on similar conversations weve been having with Virginians across the state online. Allen has turned these conversations into a following on Facebook where he has an advantage over Kaine. In June, Allen led Kaine by more than 5,200 Facebook followers with 14,091. His lead has grown, and, as of publication, Allen has 22,375 fans compared to Kaines 10,053. On Monday evening, Allen added 24 fans to Kaines two. More than 5 million Virginians are registered to vote. While Twitter may be a good way of controlling the message among the political class, Delany said Facebook is a great place to recruit rank-and-file voters, as well as grassroots supporters. Getting individual supporters to act in places like Facebook is probably more important than anything the campaign does itself, Delany said. People listen to people they trust, so if your friends and neighbors, or colleagues, are talking up a candidate, then you are more likely to listen to that. Vincent Harris, a social media consultant who has worked with several GOP campaigns including Gov. Bob McDonnells 2009 governors race, said the Facebook gap is more important to the race than Allens weakness on Twitter.

More than half of Americans have a Facebook account; 7 percent use Twitter. Twitter accounts are not at all engaging average voters, and that is just a fact, Harris said. Harris said Allen has taken advantage of the personal or social touches of Facebook, while Kaines page seemed far less engaged than his initial announcement video or Twitter account. Allens page allows supporters to post on his wall, and he also engages directly with fans in comments, likes supporters statuses and solicits feedback features absent from the Kaine page. It seems like Kaines releasing information, without trying to get information back, Harris said. Allens chief online advantage lies in advertising. Facebook allows candidates to target potential voters based upon profile information, providing a 21st century version of the direct mail campaigns traditionally used to drive support. Facebook really has the most advanced metrics in terms of online advertising, Harris said. George Allen, who has a problem with women and minority voters, is going to be able to micro-target with specific messages just seen by that specific niche audience. Delany, who has served as an online media consultant for left-leaning organizations, including the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, said Twitter solves the problem of minority outreach for free. The Leadership Conference works with more than 200 national organizations to promote and protect the civil and human rights of all persons in the United States, according to its website. Twitters ability to connect directly to cell phones engages a black-centric Twitter universe not so accessible on Facebook. The debate regarding the political merits of Twitter and Facebook is unending among the technology savvy, but Harris and Delany are unequivocal about one thing: the candidate who wins online will come out on top on Election Day in 2012. Candidates ignore the Internet at their own peril, Delany said. Kaine and Allen are running to replace Webb, who chose not to seek re-election. All Facebook: STUDY: Romney is Most Popular Politician on Facebook http://allfacebook.com/study-romney-is-most-popular-politician-on-facebook_b59630 Jennifer Moire September 23, 2011 Facebook users like former Governor Mitt Romney more than President Barack Obama. Thats the highlight of a new study by Colligent examining politicians presence on Facebook as well as Twitter and MySpace. The results couldnt come at a better time because the Republican presidential hopefuls are getting ready to kick-off another debate tonight from Orlando. The Colligent methodology is unique in a couple of ways. First, the company goes beyond follower numbers, such as Newt Gingrichs one million Twitter followers, and looks carefully at the overlap of relationships and

networks among social media channels that provides a more rounded view of a politicians social media brand. Second, the firm measures a politicians strength on social media against other brands with large followers or likes, such as musicians. As a result, some of the findings are startling. 2012 Presidential Race Romney leads President Barack Obama in the intensity race among his Facebook likes. According to Colligent, three percent of the social profiles measured show Romney with an intense but small base of politicos and insiders, as compared to President Obamas broader base of support. The Surging Candidate That honor goes to former Governor Jon Huntsman, Jr., who sees a 59 percent increase in followers every two weeks Most Social In the U.S. House of Representatives Colligent also measured the sociability of state delegations in the House of Representatives. South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Washington and Maine are leading the pack.The least socially networked delegation in the House belongs to Idaho. As for the most social congresspeople themselves, Representative Danny Rehberg (R-MT) helped lead Montana toward the top of the findings. His fans number one advocacy group? The very right leaning Heritage Foundation.In the 2012 mid-term elections, 22 percent of online Americans used social networks to engage with a campaign.According to the study, more than 9 million or 3.19 percent of the social network profiles Colligent measures are fans of at least one politician, and more than 7.5 million are fans of at least one advocacy group or organization. The complete study may be found here. Readers, how do your political affinities ompare with Colligents findings? Bloomberg Businessweek: Facebook and the Like Me election http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/facebook-and-the-like-me-election-09212011.html Elizabeth Dwoskin September 21, 2011 Michele Bachmann wants to be your friend. So much so that her campaign is scouring your travels on Facebook for the things that matter to you most. Then she can place a customized message on your page assuring you that those things are important to her, too. Bachmann did this to great effect in August, when she won the Republican straw poll in Iowa in part by zeroing in on the Facebook pages of potential supporters who lived nearby. Facebookers who had identified themselves as Tea Party supporters or Christian rock fans, or who had posted messages in favor of tax cuts or

against abortion, found an ad from Bachmann waiting for them on their profile page in the weeks before the vote, asking for their support and directing them to a link where they could arrange a free ride to the polling place. Bachmanns campaign says a significant portion of the people who pushed her over the top in Iowa they wont say how manycame as a result of the ad campaign. While some candidates are still trying to get their heads around social media Rick Perry has been known to block people he doesnt like from following him on TwitterBachmann and other well-funded candidates, including Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, are putting Facebook at the center of their campaign strategies. Working with Facebooks Washington office, they are taking advantage of just-released advertising tools the company is marketing to politicians. The software allows candidates to target campaign ads to individuals in ways that werent possible a few months ago, reaching them on a site where they spend a lot of time and are less likely to tune out the pitch. They may not know were looking for them, says Rebecca Donatelli of Campaign Solutions, a social media consulting firm in Alexandria, Va., which was hired by Bachmann. So we have to give them the opportunity to be found. Unlike expensive radio and TV ads, which are blasted out to thousands or millions of people and hit the eyes and ears of as many opponents as supporters, these appeals are often aimed at just a few hundred or even a few dozen potential voters who may never have expressed interest in the candidate. The ads use information Facebook constantly collects about its users to connect with people. In the last 45 days, Ive designed over 1,000 ads, says Michael Beach, a GOP consultant working for Romney. The campaigns are able to churn out so many ads because Facebook makes it cheap and easy to do, especially compared with TV spots or even Google (GOOG) Ads, which can reach many more people but not necessarily the ones most likely to respond favorably. Facebook ads can be had for 50 or less per clickand by counting those clicks, the campaigns know within minutes whether theyre working. Well throw out four or five different messages targeting different demographics, says Michael Hendrix, a Dallas-based consultant who works with Donatelli on the Bachmann campaign. Youre trying to figure out which message will drive a higher response. Hendrixs latest Facebook project is what he refers to as the gamification of politics. In virtual reality games such as Facebooks popular FarmVille, he sees a demographic frontier for Republicans in 2012. He has written software, to be launched later this year, that will allow FarmVille players to get active in politics within the game. Their online characters will be able to go door to door to other players imaginary farms, campaigning for real-life candidates and placing yard signs on their lawns. Hendrix is blunt about his intentions. The majority of social gamers are stay-at-home moms over 38, says Hendrix. And they vote. He hopes to use the game to target soccer moms again. Facebooks voter-sifting tools are the same as those it markets to corporations. (Sometimes the same people use the tools for politics and commerce; in addition to his work for Bachmann, Hendrix handles social media for Mot Hennessy (LVMUY), the Champagne maker.) But the pitch is different. The company has stocked its Washington operation with political pros who speak the language of campaigns and elections. In 2007, Facebook hired Adam Conner, then a 23-year-old Democrat staffer on the House Rules Committee, to help the company break into the capital. He started out slow, teaching politicians the basics of setting up a Facebook page. Democratic politicians were happy to hear Conners social media spiel, but some Republicans viewed him with suspicion. So in February, Facebook hired Katie Harbath, a 30-year-old digital strategist for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Around the office, theyre jokingly known as the R and the D.

Facebooks post-industrial space in downtown D.C., where guests are invited to write on the walls with brightly colored Sharpies, may be the most un-Washington workplace in the city. What I push with folks is that, while the fan count matters, how many people are interacting with it really matters, says Harbath, who is one of a dozen people working for Facebook in Washington. How many people are liking it, commenting on it, sharing it with their friends. Which raises an important question: Is the effort and money Bachmann and her rivals put into all this liking, commenting, and sharing bringing tangible results that can be measured in volunteers, donations, and ultimately votes next November? The answer is: They dont know yet. No one has figured out how to monetize the like, says Donatelli. What Facebook provides at the moment is an efficient way to reach someone without having to reach everyone and an enormous platform to get a message across without interference from the conventional media. Its not in the sheer numbers, but in the intensity of your followers, Donatelli says. She says that Bachmann fans tend to be issue-driven and feverishly post and cross-post on Facebook, keeping the candidates name in the conversation even as her poll numbers slide compared with Romneys and Perrys. Ultimately, Bachmanns team believes conversation will translate into action and money, like they say it did in Iowa this summer. Otherwise, they say, they wouldnt bother wasting precious resources on it. Whats the point of having a fan or a follower if they dont do anything? says Donatelli. At the end of the day, this is a persuasion tool. ClickZ: Romney Offers E-Book for Price of a Tweet http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/2107574/romney-offers-book-price-tweet Kate Kaye September 11, 2011 At tonight's presidential debate, as Republicans complain that Americans can barely afford to fill their gas tanks, Mitt Romney will offer his new jobs plan book at a rock bottom price: the cost of a tweet. The candidate is making a splash on Amazon and across the web, as his just-published "Believe in America: Mitt Romney's Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth" e-book rapidly climbs the Kindle Store charts today. Before tonight's NBC News/Politico debate, the Romney campaign plans to push out a "Pay with a Tweet" option for downloading the digital book - which is also available for free on Amazon. The tool is a social payment system developed by two R/GA employees that allows people to easily exchange virtual goods for a tweet. It won a Grand Prix at this year's Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. The goal for the Romney campaign is to generate social buzz around the former Massachusetts Governor's ebook, published today in anticipation of tonight's debate and President Barack Obama's jobs plan speech scheduled for tomorrow. While the e-book is available for free download as a PDF document on MittRomney.com/Jobs and on Amazon, the campaign considers the tweet offering to be just another way to get it in front of voters where they are, rather than driving them to visit the campaign site or Amazon. "The premise we've always worked on is...you have to have these digital embassies all over the web," said Zac Moffatt, digital director at Romney for President. "If you send a tweet out we provide you with opportunity to download it right there." The tweet-for-download option will be promoted on the campaign's Facebook page, web site, and - of course - with a tweet from the @MittRomney account, according to Moffatt.

The campaign in the future may run Facebook Sponsored Stories ads to push the book, said Moffatt. The book puts forth several specific proposals to boost the U.S. economy and create jobs, and is currently number 19 on Amazon's Kindle Best Sellers list after debuting today. The Romney team has also experimented with short-form video platform Tout recently, which enables 15second video updates for Twitter and Facebook. Unlike many of the campaign's heavily-produced videos for YouTube, the Tout videos are quick snippets of raw footage of the candidate elaborating on where he is and what hes doing - such as opening his Florida campaign headquarters. The campaign plans to post its fourth brief Tout video featuring a debate walk-through tonight, said Moffatt. All Facebook: Rick Perrys Campaign: Facebook is Not a Gimmick http://allfacebook.com/rick-perrys-campaign-facebook-is-not-a-gimmick_b56350 Jennifer Moire August 26, 2011 Ryan Gravatt, a former journalist who recently joined the Rick Perry for President campaign, talked with us about Facebook strategy in the Republican presidential primary. How will the campaigns approach to Facebook differ from the other GOP candidates? We are going to stay focused on genuine interaction and conversations that reinforce relationships that Governor Perry builds while he campaigns. He is a tireless campaigner and he enjoys people and mingling with crowds. Its a quality that sets him apart from other candidates, and because of this, people bond with him when they meet him. Facebook is a great platform for our campaign to push a message in Governor Perrys voice to his supporters. So, when they read a post from our campaign, whether its on Twitter or Facebook, it reinforces the connection people have with him and with each other as supporters of a terrific Republican. Will your social media strategy differ from the approach used in the Governors 2010 campaign? Its always evolving to take advantage of the current situation. No doubt, we will connect with more and more supporters on Facebook. However, Im not concerned with follower numbers. Im more concerned with our social reach on Facebook. I measure our current reach and engagement numbers on Facebook. While audience size helps improve those numbers, so does the quality of those connections. A giant Facebook audience does no good if its dormant. I like where we are with quality and social reach on Facebook, and Ill be looking daily to improve that. In 2010, we wondered whether numbers really mattered. Now that we know the quality of the engagement matters more than numbers, were going to focus on that. How will the Perry campaign use Facebook? What tactics will you employ to boost engagement? Well, social networking and Facebook are perhaps the most complementary online tools for Governor Perry.

In this campaign we are going to continue to make sure our online activity bolsters the message Governor Perry delivers lets get America working again. Well never treat the social network as a gimmick and well never take those relationships for granted. Governor Perry wants to connect with as many voters as possible and he understands that Facebook allows him to do that. Of course, hed rather sit with each and everyone of them for coffee and talk about politics, college football and barbeque, but we just cant let him do that. He would, if the schedule allowed, but we have to keep him moving. How large is the campaigns Facebook team? Everyone on the campaign is on Facebook, and everyone is allowed to say what they think we need to do on Facebook. Theres no closet of gurus or experts on this campaign. So, a handful of us are responsible for the page content, but there are no walls. Were all thinking about social media and the best ways to capitalize on it. Some of us vet the ideas, but for the most part great ideas come from all over the campaign from Governor Perry, from staff, and from supporters. What kind of skills do you think are necessary to be successful in social media on a presidential campaign? Quick wit, confidence to seize the day, good spelling and polished mass communication experience. Do you have any favorite Facebook applications or tools you are enthusiastic about? Were building a couple of our own that are unique. So stay tuned. Forbes: A Plea to the GOP: Dont Pull a Digital Nixon http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2011/08/25/a-plea-to-the-gop-dont-pull-a-digitalnixon/?utm_source=Red+Edge1&utm_campaign=7a3f4a2fe0-ForbesFBFail&utm_medium=email Bret Jacobson August 25, 2011 Richard Nixons performance against John F. Kennedy in the nations first televised presidential debate was so bad that it not only left him ruing his own mistakes saying I should have remembered that a picture is worth a thousand words but also imprinted a lesson about technology and politics that many on the Right side of the aisle have forgotten: You must go beyond simply using a platform; you have to use it well. In 1960, both Nixon and Kennedy were on stage for every major debate. In that sense and through the ability to buy television ads, both had equal access to an emerging medium. There was little doubt that Nixons post-illness weakened frame, poor makeup work, and profuse sweating left him at a disadvantage that helped turn the tide. Even Kennedy would say, following his victory, that It was TV more than anything else that turned the tide. Kennedy used TV and used it well. TV remains a dominant power in todays political outreach, but it is no longer a solo superpower. Pew figures from shortly after the 2008 election showed digital making major strides in its role as a key news source for voters, and social tools are making it easier for outsiders to make waves. Certainly, then candidate Obama

demonstrated the ability to upset establishment favorites by directing passion into action organizing, registering voters, donations, and more online. GOP candidate Ron Paul also demonstrated in 2008 that online coordination tools enable activists to help a lesser-known candidate shape a national debate. Those efforts paid dividends this year, with Paul coming in second at the recent Ames Straw Polljust behind Michele Bachmann, who invested in shrewdly integrating digital boots on the ground to her overall, successful push in Iowa. The phenomenon makes sense when you consider Harvard professor Barry Burdens words: In elections such as congressional primaries, where information levels are extremely low and party cues do not help voters distinguish candidates, name recognition is perhaps the most important factor. So its all well and good to say that political candidates need to use digital tools well, but what does that mean in the real world? Facebook. The most important social platform, Facebook, has grown tremendously from 130 million users at the last election to 700 million worldwide, with twice as many U.S. users as those watching the last Super Bowl. In 2008, Obama had four times as many Facebook followers as did John McCain. Right now, Obama 2012 has about four times as many adherents as Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Paul, Bachman, Perry and the Republican National Committee combined. But its not just about size on Facebook. Its about high levels of user engagement incorporating and analyzing data from permission-based applications, pulling in donations from users without making them leave the platform, and making a seamless tie-in with real-world campaign strategy. Anything short and its the equivalent of Nixon eschewing proper makeup before the big debate you get sweaty but you dont win. Mobile. Youve likely already heard chatter about the importance of mobile in the next election. While theres always similar frothy talk from purveyors of the new, the numbers are eye-opening. In a world of 100% text-message open rates, its good to know that 83% of Americans have cell phones and 42% have web-capable smart phones, according to a May release of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. (The same source adds that 25% use smart phones, not computers, for a majority of web surfing.) Location, location, location. Smart campaigns on the Right will attempt to answer, then best, Obamas MyBO efforts to bring activists together in their communities by organizing events, encouraging check ins at events and campaign offices, taking the next step in mobile technologies to support voter registration and GOTV, and advertising to mobile users based on their location. Twitter. One area where the Right is clearly outpacing the Left is the 140-character juggernaut. This summer, presidential candidates are now participating in innovative Twitter debates, Congressional Members frequently dialogue with their constituents, and the Party infrastructure has hired clever Tweeple. Yet, Twitter is just one of the important battlefields in the digital map, and the obvious temptation is for campaigns, candidates and causes to simply open a Facebook and Twitter account and call it good. But as Bachmann and Paul showed this week, using tools well can facilitate attention-grabbing wins along the campaign trail.

So successful campaigns using digital tools well should always be congratulated, sometimes emulated (never duplicated), and always topped. Showing up is a great first step. Then its time to understand how to win in an emerging medium. Tech President: Heres the Dish on Tweeter-Using Texan Rick Perrys Online Presidential Campaign http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/heres-dish-tweeter-using-texan-rick-perrys-online-presidentialcampaign Nick Judd August 16, 2011 Texas Gov. Rick Perry has come out shooting on the campaign trail, with headline-grabbing bluster aimed at Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and President Barack Obama himself but underneath that rough exterior is a famously well-oiled fundraising machine. To keep its gears turning, the Perry campaign for 2012 will lean on many of the same online tactics that kept him in the Texas statehouse in 2010. For many people, that might invoke the image of an Obama-style online campaign, full of phone banks and campaign emails to motivate repeated donations from small-dollar donors. But that's just one way to work online; Perry's fundraising modus operandi is to collect donations with higher dollar amounts from fewer donors, and one of the Texan's online consultants says the campaign will be deploying online tools to make that easier to do. Perry has taken some jabs for demonstrating a less-than-complete grasp on social media, but his campaigns have been social-media savvy. He called Twitter "tweeter" in a video address to the Right Online conference in Minneapolis in June. In March, it was reported that he tried to block specific reporters from his personal Twitter account even though the account is public. Today, Ben Smith passed along one former Perry opponent's allegation that his 2010 gubernatorial campaign "created artificial people to Tweet." But Perry was one of the first governors to have a thoughtful Twitter strategy keeping separate personal, gubernatorial and campaign accounts and his campaigns are savvy, too. Last year, he sealed his 2010 gubernatorial re-election without investing much in collateral like yard signs or direct mail. That could have been as much a function of Perry's habit of winning as anything he was en route to a third term as governor but it's not a campaign move you'd make if you were wary of bucking the script and trying new things online. "He's from West Texas and, that may just be his accent," said Ryan Gravatt, Perry 2012's online strategist and a veteran of his 2010 campaign as well. "But whether it's Twitter or 'tweeter,' he knows how to use it." The campaign will try to cultivate the support of people with large social media followings influencers to help create online donors, and plans to roll out a special tool for its top fund-raisers to use to solicit donations, Gravatt told me. Software targeted specifically for the folks who tap their connections on the campaign's behalf bundlers in political parlance was one of the evolutions that began in 2008 and carried through to 2010. New software products for bundlers allow volunteers to do things like process credit card donations and mine their Facebook contacts for potential donors, all from a web-based interface. This will probably be of special importance for Perry, who has a reputation for tapping into networks of highdollar donors. Gravatt is hip to the idea, but says the campaign hasn't picked a vendor yet to do this. And bundlers won't be the campaign's only focus. As in 2010, Gravatt said, Perry's 2012 website uses software that presents visitors with different messaging depending on how they got there and whether they've been there before.

"If they come to us from Facebook, we're not going to ask us to like them on Facebook, we're going to ask them to make a donation," Gravatt said. The online consultant had a busy weekend. He wouldn't give specifics, but said RickPerry.org has had a good couple of days, reaching six-figure traffic numbers. Perry's Facebook audience exploded over the weekend, from about 85,000 people on Friday afternoon to over 116,000 today; according to 2012twit.com, he gained nearly 1,900 followers in the last 24 hours, for a current total of 65,000. Audience totals don't mean much, but dramatic changes in social media following can be an indicator of forward or backwards momentum. Last weekend was, without question, a buzzworthy one for Perry but it has yet to be seen if that momentum is an indicator of a campaign fameball or a contender with a demeanor and a set of policy messages that will propel him through the primary elections. "I really don't want to get out there and brag on it," Gravatt said when I asked him for more details about Perry's weekend haul. "I don't want people to think we feel like we've got this locked up and we're on easy street." Update: Deeper into history techPres editor and chief politicotechnical historian Micah Sifry drags up this Perry for Governor 2006 campaign artifact through the Wayback Machine: A points-based social activism network that may well have been the first of its kind. All Facebook: 2012 GOP Hopefuls Descend on Iowa and Facebook http://allfacebook.com/2012-gop-hopefuls-descend-on-iowa-and-facebook_b54658 Jennifer Moire August 12, 2011 The Republican Partys candidates for president and their supporters are descending on Iowa this week as the primary season officially gets underway, and Republican voters are posting up a storm on Facebook. The festivities started last night when Fox News hosted a GOP debate with eight of the main candidates at Iowa State University in Ames. The debate was a precursor to the main event: The Ames Straw Poll at Iowa State University tomorrow. The straw poll has become a right of passage for Republican presidential hopefuls as it marks the unofficial launch of the GOP primary campaign season before the first votes are counted at the Iowa Caucuses early next year. The debate didnt disappoint judging by the reaction on Facebook. Status updates during the debate ranged from how each of the candidates were faring to the strength of the questions posed by the Fox News hosts. The Fox News GOP Debate Facebook app generated more than 1,340 comments from viewers with dozens of posts going up each hour during the two-hour event. Not surprisingly, Facebook was flooded with posts devoted to Texas Representative Ron Paul, whose legions of fans are renowned for their extremely vocal support of the candidate during radio and TV call-in shows, at political gatherings and yes, on Facebook. And, at this writing, Rep. Paul won the debate with 46.52 percent of the vote according to Fox News Facebook poll.

And even politicians who neither participated in the debate nor will be at Saturdays straw poll are getting attention on Facebook. Take New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, whose supporters complained on Facebook all day long that he was excluded from the debate. The governor himself took to Twitter and Facebook to share his views as the debate rolled along without him. Both former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who is busing into Iowa this weekend, and Texas Governor Rick Perry , who is expected to jump into the race officially on Saturday, didnt participate in last nights debate but received plenty of attention nonetheless on the social networking site. Do you think the enthusiasm for a candidate on Facebook will translate into votes? Salt Lake Tribune: D.C. Notebook: Huntsman Losing Facebook Primary http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/politics/52241982-90/huntsman-facebook-com-lee.html.csp Thomas Burr and Matt Canham July 24, 2011 Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman retooled his presidential campaign staff last week, elevating his communications director to campaign manager and promising a more aggressive effort. He needs it. Huntsman has yet to make up much ground in national or early state polls, and he seems to be losing another test of support: Facebook likes. Mitt Romney has racked up more than 1 million supporters on his Facebook page, Michele Bachmann has 430,634 who have signed on to her fan site. Herman Cain has 153,576 and Tim Pawlenty 103,518. Huntsman? 9,571. To be fair, Huntsman has only officially been a candidate for a little over a month and didn't take over his Facebook fan site until right before he announced. His Republican opponents have had much more time. Still, he's got a long way to go before he can catch up to their support level. UPI: Politics 2011: Politics Gets Real in the Virtual World of Social Media http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2011/07/24/Politics-2011-Politics-gets-real-in-the-virtual-world-ofsocial-media/UPI-97211311497640/ Nicole Debevec July 24, 2011 Want to catch that debate among U.S. presidential hopefuls but aren't near a television? Go to Twitter. Need that candidate's position on a subject? Check a Web site. Gotta follow a candidate's schedule? Log in to Facebook. Whatever you need from a political candidate, you can probably find it online -- be it Web site, social forum or photo-sharing site. This isn't our parents' presidential campaign. Instead of sound bites on the nightly news and one or two televised debates, candidates hoping to make 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. their temporary address are bombarding potential voters on the airwaves and through the Internet.

Candidates are already staking their claims on what may be one of the most important pieces of real estate during the election -- social media Web sites, from Twitter, to Facebook to YouTube. A mere Web site -unheard of even a few elections ago -- simply isn't enough. Social networking has grown exponentially and if politicians and parties want to tap into the voting pool, this is where they have to go, The Huffington Post wrote recently. Also, free speech trumps regulation online. With the onslaught of super-PACs, shaping the political landscape between now and November belongs to those who can get their messages out effectively in a digital world. President Obama successfully used the Internet to get his message out while taking in hundreds of millions of dollars from small donors using Facebook. Businessman Herman Cain and Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, both declared candidates in the Republican presidential nominating race, use online "moneybombing" to raise donations. Obama also used online media to announce his re-election bid and conduct a virtual town hall. Just last week, the first-ever Twitter debate was conducted among six of the announced Republican candidates vying for the 2012 presidential nomination. The candidates spent 90 minutes answering questions using no more than 140 characters -- the limit on Twitter posts. The debate was organized by Andrew Hemingway, chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Liberty Caucus, who told ConcordPatch.com the event was a success. "There was a lot of public interaction; overall, it was very good," Hemingway told the New Hampshire site. "We had an immense amount of traffic and there is no way to predict or know the type of reaction there was going to be." Of course there's a certain amount of trust in who's posting what on Twitter during a candidates debate. "Do we have some secure way to prove they are [the ones posting remarks]? No, we don't," Hemingway said. "But I don't know any candidate who's going to allow their junior staffer or new-media guy to go answer questions in a debate for them, no matter what format." Earlier this year, articles were written about Republican congressional members' general reluctance to embrace Facebook -- but more readily taking to Twitter than Democrats. Facebook, which permanently stamped its imprint on national politics since Obama used it in his 2008 run, wants to let Republicans play in its sandbox, too. Five high-profile GOP strategists have joined Facebook's outreach team in recent months, RealClearPolitics.com reported. One main reason: They want to learn how Facebook works so they can pass along that knowledge to their party's politicians. "President Obama proved Facebook can be a very potent tool in elections," Joel Kaplan, George W. Bush's former deputy chief of staff now vice president of U.S. public policy for the site, told RealClearPolitics.com. "Facebook is changing the way people are living their lives -- certainly in the public policy space." A branding effort is under way at Facebook to make the 2012 election into "The Social Campaign" by linking candidates and campaigns to all of the site's networking capabilities.

"The color of the site is blue," Kaplan notes, "but the color of the company is purple." In his re-election bid, Obama again will use social media networks to reach all of his online friends. "The successful campaign is going to be one that integrates all the various elements of the digital channel -e-mail, text, Web site, mobile apps and social networks -- together as one digital program and also mixing the digital program together with the offline reality of field organizations," Joe Rospars, the Obama campaign's chief digital strategist, told TMCnet.com in a statement. Political campaigns also are bumping up their use of online advertising, taking advantage of those 15- to 30 seconds of ad time before video clips running on sites such as YouTube and Hulu, TMCnet.com reported. "We're getting a lot of questions now from people thinking strategically on how to drive their message next year online," Andrew Roos, a political ads executive with Google, said. Three things give social media the power to influence campaigns, a recent Ad Age study indicated: Audience: Social media isn't just for the young -- use by people age 50 or better is on the rise. Voters of all political stripes now rely on social media to connect them to campaigns. Influence: Television isn't as influential as it once was and the average age of the nightly news viewer is nearly 63. If a candidate wants his message heard by the critical 18-35 demographic, that candidate best have some social media chops, Ad Age said. The majority of all Internet ad impressions occur on Facebook and Facebook apps. In today's digital world, Facebook friends' suggestions matter more than a TV commercial or newspaper editorial, so getting a political message into those news feeds on a Facebook page is the vital, Ad Age said. Money: Serious money is being directed into online and mobile advertising because of their size and power to influence -- and their ability to go viral, yielding more bang for the buck, Ad Age reported. (Notice how the first three letters spell "aim" -- which candidates must do to reach their virtual friends successfully?) Plus, political messages within social media promise to engage users. An Ad Age SocialVibe study found that 94 percent of social media users of voting age engaged by a political message watched the entire message, and 39 percent of the viewers shared the message with an average of 130 online friends, rippling beyond the initial, targeted audience. Huffington Post: Is Facebook the New Iowa? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hillery-nye/is-facebook-the-new-iowa_b_904476.html Hillery Nye July 20, 2011 The 2012 election is more than a year and a half away, and already the candidates are positioning themselves to take on what will undoubtedly be one of the most important battlegrounds -- social media. While Iowa and New Hampshire can bicker about which is more important to the early voting process, they are overlooking one crucial element: in another year they could both be diminished by an even earlier vote -Facebook.

Facebook could very well replace Iowa and New Hampshire as the most important early voter forum in the primaries. The upcoming presidential election will be the first in history to be truly defined, not just shaped, by social media. Why? Facebook and SuperPACs are now friends. Two reasons why we will see this shift to social media: (1) social networking has grown exponentially -- if politicians and parties want to find friends and curry voters, this is where they need to go; (2) free speech trumps regulation in the online ecosystem -- and with the new phenom of SuperPACs, the political landscape will be highly influenced by those who are promoting a particular agenda and those who can do it online. This is the first presidential election where we will see the practical impact of the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission (which struck down the 20+-year ban on certain political contributions by private corporations). This is also the first presidential election where social networking was more than a fad or fringe experience, but the modern equivalent of the telephone and town square. Today, voters are more likely to receive and share information about politics and politicians from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube than TV or traditional media. For the first time, voters, political action committees (PACs) and campaign supporters will have unprecedented freedom to campaign and raise funds online for their chosen candidates. Think Obama's online fundraising was impressive in 2008? That will be nothing compared to the amount of activity that will happens in the 2012 race. These changes will dramatically transform the landscape of the 2012 election, as social media becomes the key battleground for candidates, political parties, PACs and voters. Social media could also erode the traditional advertising market for TV networks. Expect all of these rapid changes to create a considerable amount of turmoil in the campaign process as candidates and parties will have to "re-learn" campaigning, in a new socially-driven world. It's also going to be the key to fundraising. More money is going to be raised and moved through social networking sites and other online campaigns than ever before -- making them critical to a campaign's success. As Obama proved in 2008, the power of small online donations can be profound, and the fight for these dollars will be more competitive than ever as each candidate adopts similar tactics into their fundraising strategies. As each candidate spends more time on personalized social media campaigns, their traditional commercial advertising efforts will suffer. Television's shrinking reach simply cannot complete with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and their growing audiences. Coupled with the relatively low costs of online engagement, we could experience more pop-ups than political ads. Now, through strategic use of targeted campaigning, candidates will have an opportunity to create tailored and personalized appeals to these voters.

Thanks in large part to content sharing, social media has become the most effective and affordable way to brand a campaign, reach the masses, and build relationships. Whether it is through advertising, surveys, videos, or personalized tweets, social media allows countless ways for candidates to get their message heard. The true winner of the election will be the candidate who effectively uses these digital platforms to influence and ultimately connect with those voters who might not otherwise enter into the political arena. We'll have to wait to see how social media shapes the election and change the landscape for future elections. But there is no doubt that it will have a game-changing effect, because for the first time, how an election is won and lost will be decided online. All Facebook: Tim Pawlenty Testing Facebooks Sponsored Stories http://allfacebook.com/tim-pawlenty-testing-facebook-sponsored-stories_b44916 Jennifer Moire May 27, 2011 Since former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty announced last Sunday that he was throwing his hat into the Republican presidential race, his digital media team has been testing a sponsored stories campaign on GFacebook. According to ClickZ, Engage, the digital firm representing Pawlentys campaign, has been working closely with Facebook on a variety of new ad formats. Page post ads, one of a few variations of the sponsored stories units, automatically display the latest post made to a page. So, the ads pull in the latest status update made on the candidates page, and dynamically create ads featuring the post in copy. The ads entice users to hit like, which in turn notifies their friends of the liking action within their news feeds. According to Engage, the sponsored stories ads give the candidate a prominent placement among news feed posts and when supporters click the like button, that action becomes part of their friends news feeds. These ads are both relatively inexpensive and yield a generally higher engagement rate because its targeting people who are already engaged (but might be overwhelmed with updates on their news feed if they like a lot of pages). TBG Digital says sponsored stories have a 46 percent higher click-through rate than other types of ads on the site. Now the elusive question: Is there evidence that these ads were effective in the Pawlenty campaigns first week? Engage is measuring the ads against engagement and action but so far it looks promising. What do you think of political campaigns use of Facebook ads? Washington Post: Facebook, President Obama, and the Youth Vote in 2012 http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/facebook-president-obama-and-the-youth-vote-in2012/2011/04/20/AF9zCwCE_blog.html Chris Cillizza April 20, 2011

President Obama will host a town hall event today at Facebook headquarters, a first-of-its-kind event and the latest sign of his renewed courtship of young voters in advance of the 2012 election. Obamas decision to trek to the hub of the social networking movement comes on the heels of a heavy youth presence in Obamas web video announcing his plan to seek a second term that was released a few weeks ago. Even though I couldnt exactly vote at the time, I knew that someday Id be able to help re-elect him and thats what I plan on doing, says a young man identified as Mike in the video. Whats clear is that the Obama political team views young voters a s a fundamental building block to him winning a second term in 2012. The harder question to answer is whether they can they re-create the political magic Obama demonstrated with young people in 2008. In the wake of the 2008 election, much was made of the power of the youth vote and the ways in which it helped Obama. But there is still widespread misunderstanding about the real impact of young voters. In 2004, young people defined as those aged 18-29 comprised 17 percent of the overall electorate and went for Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry by a nine-point margin. In 2008, young people were only a slightly higher percentage of the electorate 18 percent but Obama won them by 34 points. But, it wasnt only Obamas increased margins among young people that mattered. In 2004, 120 million people voted, meaning that young people accounted for roughly 20.4 million votes. In 2008, 130 million people cast ballots, with 23.4 million of those cast by 18-29 year olds. (That was the largest turnout of young voters in terms of raw numbers in modern presidential history. The only race that came close was in 1992 when nearly 22 million voters aged 18-29 turned out.) So, turnout rose by 10 million overall between 2004 and 2008 and three million of that 30 percent came among young people. That simple piece of math explains everything you need to know about why Obama is re-targeting young people so aggressively. Whether its realistic for President Obama and his team to think that they can sustain his 2008 appeal among young people is a point of considerable contention. The naysayers note that Candidate Obama was able to channel young peoples hopes for politics (and society) in a way that President Obama saddled with the constraints of governing cant hope to equal. President Obama is going to help us [get the youth vote] because a bunch of people that voted for him last time feel duped, and they arent going to sign up again for dupe version two, former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty (R) told the Vanderbilt University newspaper late last month . Doubters also point out that young people largely checked out of the 2010 midterm elections, comprising just 12 percent of the electorate and watching their overall numbers drop from 23.5 million in 2008 to just 10.8 million in 2010.

Those numbers, they argue, are evidence that Obamas connection with youth voters amounted to specific moment in time that cannot be re-engineered in 2012. (Turnout in midterm elections, however, is traditionally lower across-the-board than it is in a presidential race.) Obama allies insist that there remains a plausible case to be made that the youth vote of 2008 is repeatable. The case they make has a symbolic and a demographic element. On the symbolic level, they insist that young voters retain a genuine connection with Obama and that there is a level of personal investment in him (and what they believe he represents) to think that there will be no lull in excitement within the group heading into 2012. On the demographic level, there will be eight million people aged 18 to 22 who will vote for the first time in 2012, according to calculations done by Obamas chief pollster Joel Benenson. Theoretically, that segment of young voters could more than make up for any dropoff Obama might see in the broader age demographic particularly if his campaign can win them at the two-to-one rate he did in 2008. The youth vote was the story of the 2008 election. Obama and his campaign are hoping they can re-tell it again in 2012. Huffington Post: Elections 2012: The Social Network, Presidential Campaign Edition http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/17/elections-2012-social-media_n_850172.html Beth Fouhy April 17, 2011 NEW YORK Republican Tim Pawlenty disclosed his 2012 presidential aspirations on Facebook. Rival Mitt Romney did it with a tweet. President Barack Obama kicked off his re-election bid with a digital video emailed to the 13 million online backers who helped power his historic campaign in 2008. Welcome to The Social Network, presidential campaign edition. The candidates and contenders have embraced the Internet to far greater degrees than previous White House campaigns, communicating directly with voters on platforms where they work and play. If Obama's online army helped define the last campaign and Howard Dean's Internet fundraising revolutionized the Democratic primary in 2004, next year's race will be the first to reflect the broad cultural migration to the digital world. "You have to take your message to the places where people are consuming content and spending their time," said Romney's online director, Zac Moffatt. "We have to recognize that people have choices and you have to reach them where they are, and on their terms." The most influential of those destinations include the video sharing website YouTube; Facebook, the giant social network with 500 million active users; and Twitter, the cacophonous conversational site where news is made and shared in tweets of 140 characters or less. All the campaigns have a robust Facebook presence, using the site to post videos and messages and to host online discussions. In the latest indication of the site's reach and influence, Obama plans to visit Facebook

headquarters in California this coming Wednesday for a live chat with company founder Mark Zuckerberg and to take questions from users who submit questions on the site. Candidates have embraced Twitter with an intensity that rivals pop star Justin Bieber's. Twitter was the Republican hopefuls' platform of choice last Wednesday, moments after Obama gave a budget speech calling for some tax increases and decrying GOP proposals to cut Medicare. "President Obama doesn't get it. The fear of higher taxes tomorrow hurts job creation today," Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour tweeted. "The president's plan will kill jobs and increase the deficit," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich warned in a tweet, attaching a link to a more detailed statement posted on Facebook. In the past, candidates would have pointed supporters to their websites for such a response. Now, as Moffatt puts it, "the campaign site may be headquarters, but it needs digital embassies across the web." Republicans once seemed slow to harness the power of the web. The party's 2008 nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, told reporters he didn't even use email. The 2012 hopefuls have worked hard to prove their Internet savvy, particularly with social media. Pawlenty "understands the power of new technology and he wants it to be at the forefront. We are going to compete aggressively with President Obama in this space," spokesman Alex Conant said. Conant pointed to efforts to live stream videos to Facebook and award points and badges to supporters in a way that mirrors Foursquare, the emerging location-based mobile site. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain's 2008 running mate and a potential presidential candidate this time, has made Facebook a centerpiece of her communication efforts to supporters. Palin has been criticized for treating it as a one-way form of communication that allows her to bypass direct questions from reporters and voters. Other Republicans insist they're willing to wade into the messy digital fray and cede some control of their message. "We trust our supporters and want to err on the side of giving them more control, not less," Conant said. Just as social networking liberates candidates to take their message directly to voters, it offers plenty of pitfalls as well. It's prone to mischief, with dozens of fake Twitter accounts and Facebook pages popping up daily that are intended to embarrass the candidates. Also, a candidate's gaffe or an inconsistency on issues can be counted on to go viral immediately. Gingrich has gotten ensnared in some online traps. His apparent back-and-forth on whether the U.S. should intervene in the conflict in Libya was discussed widely and amplified online. He first advocated military engagement, then came out against it after Obama ordered airstrikes. Twitter lit up with the news that a photo on Gingrich's exploratory website showing people waving flags was a stock photo once used by the late liberal Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass. Spokesman Rick Tyler rejected such criticism and said Gingrich has pioneered the use of digital technology.

"Over 1.4 million people follow him on Twitter. He has a very active Facebook. There are eight websites connected to organizations started by Newt (that) use social media platforms to communicate to their coalitions," Tyler said. But Josh Dorner, who tracks GOP candidates online for the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, said the Republican presidential hopefuls appear to be unprepared for the unforgiving pace of the digital age. Obama, who in 2008 had to recover from plenty of web-amplified flubs such as his comment that bitter small town voters "cling" to guns and religion, will probably be more nimble, Dorner said. "We are moving in a warp speed environment, and none of the Republican candidates understand the media environment in which they're operating. It puts them at a huge disadvantage to the president," Dorner said. Strategists also say the greatest digital innovation in 2012 may not even have surfaced yet, even as campaigns figure out how to do effective microtargeting ads for Facebook and work to develop "apps" for smart phones rather than laptops and traditional TV. "As with anything, there's going to be a shiny new cell phone every six months," said Matt Ortega, a former online organizer for the Democratic National Committee. "You're going to see both new tools and more sophistication in existing tools." The Hill: Cornyn: Lawmakers Having to Conquer Fear of Social Media http://thehill.com/blogs/twitter-room/other-news/155587-cornyn-lawmakers-having-to-conquer-fear-ofsocial-media Michael OBrien April 12, 2011 Lawmakers are coming to grips with how "essential" social media tools like Facebook and Twitter are to spreading their message and connecting with constituents, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said Tuesday. Cornyn, a top GOP senator who actively uses Twitter and Facebook, acknowledged that not all of his colleagues were comfortable with engaging social media, but they're coming around. "I think a number of our senators are not comfortable with it, but they're having to learn," Cornyn said in a webcast hosted by Facebook at its Washington, D.C. office. "In politics today, it is absolutely essential. If you're not conversant with the social media ... you're really going to be hurting yourself." Cornyn leads the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), the committee leading Senate Republicans' campaign efforts. He said that one of the biggest pieces of advice he offers to recruits is to be sure to engage with social media and blogs and to actively pounce on stories that could spin out of control otherwise. He also acknowledged that President Obama's campaign in 2008 was especially skillful in using online resources to help win the election. Republicans, Cornyn said, are working on building their own infrastructure. "Frankly, Republicans have kind of come to it a little slower than others," he said.

The Texas senator is one of the rare members of Congress to personally engage the social media services on a regular basis. While many lawmakers have their staff assemble tweets or Facebook postings, Cornyn more often posts his own content -- to the dismay, sometimes, of his staff. "I will say that one of the things that strikes fear in the heart of my press shop is that I'll send out some unfiltered thought," he said. "I find it kind of exhilarating." NPR: Politicians Take to Technology for 2012 http://www.npr.org/blogs/talk/2011/04/10/135241350/politicians-take-to-technology-for-2012 Colin Campbell April 8, 2011 President Obama kicked off his re-election campaign earlier this week, with a video posted on his website and an email and text message blast to supporters stating, "Today, we are filing papers to launch our 2012 campaign because we've got more work to do." Two weeks earlier, Tim Pawlenty, the former Governor of Minnesota, took to his Facebook page and announce in a slickly produced web video that he would be forming "an exploratory committee to run for President of the United States." Whatever happened to politicians announcing their candidacy outside of state capitols, like Bill Clinton in 1991? Or in person, to a room full of reporters, like President Regan in 1976? Even President Obama, whose campaign is credited for pioneering campaigning in the digital age, opted for a traditional announcement declaring his candidacy on the steps of the Old Illinois State Capitol. The announcements by Governor Pawlenty and President Obama mark the kick-off of the 2012 campaign calendar, and these launches are already hinting at what next year's presidential race is going to look like...and it's going to be markedly different. For the first time, a presidential race will exist primarily online. Think beyond Facebook and Twitter for a moment. Sure, the two social media behemoths are going to play a large role, but a suite of other technologies are going to change the landscape of grassroots campaigning as well - location based applications, for example. Last summer, the Democratic National Committee came out with a mobile app that integrated tools that allowed users to find political events in their community. It also provided a database of linked contact information to reach members of Congress. All of this specialized information was based off of the user's zip code at the time of launching the application. You can just imagine the growth of similar technologies come 2012. With more people than ever using smartphones and tablets to access information, campaigns will want to reach voters in the palm of their hand. During last fall's midterm elections, several campaigns produced mobile apps to connect with voters. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who found himself in a particularly competitive race, released an iPhone/iPod app that integrated his website, Twitter feed, Facebook page, YouTube channel and Flickr account so his followers would be able to be to track his every move. But it wasn't just one-way communication he also asked his supporters to "upload their own photos, videos and other content to the app to share with the campaign." I imagine that the 2012 presidential race will see a similar approach, with candidates embracing personal apps for the Apple App Store, Android Market and BlackBerry App World, to reach people on every platform. What will be interesting to watch, though, is when they will become available. Will GOP candidates release them during the Republican primary to beat up on their opponents? Or would that be too politically risky (not to mention expensive)? Since Howard Dean's run in 2004, campaigns have been creative in leveraging technology to advance their message. I am sure that the 2012 will be no different. So as more candidates jump into the race over the

next several months, make sure to pay attention to how and where they announce; it is one of the first indicators to the kind of campaign they will run. And you can be sure to bet, technology will play a major role. TechCrunch: Obama's Re-election Campaign Puts Facebook Front And Center Literally http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/04/obamas-re-election-campaign-puts-facebook-front-and-center-literally/ Robin Wauters April 4, 2011 U.S. Presidents Barack Obamas re-election campaign just been kicked off, and it again makes clever use of Facebook as a tool for spreading the word and amass supporters. When you connect to your Facebook account on the campaign website, an interactive banner will appear on the top of the website that shows you which of your friends arent in yet, profile pictures included. Youre invited to put post a message to your friends walls to prompt them to join the Are You In? application. You can easily scroll to your friend list by skipping from one to the next, and you can add an optional message when you opt to post to a friends wall. Obamas Facebook page has been liked by close to 19 million people. According to a message posted on the campaign website, theyre starting off small both online and offline and plan to boost efforts at a later stage: One thing that may strike you is that theres just not as much here as there used to be. As this campaign gets off the ground, we want to start smallonline and offand develop something new in the coming weeks and months. The idea is to improve upon whats worked for the past four years, scrap what hasnt, and build a campaign that reflects the thoughts and experiences of the supporters whove powered this movement. And later: This is just the beginning. Well be adding to this site, opening new field offices, training organizers, and developing plans every single day, and we hope youll play an active role. The first step of all this is an unprecedented program to hold one-on-one conversations with millions of supporters about where they want this campaign to golook for lots of news about that over the next several weeks as the process unfolds. YouTube is also one of the things that have apparently worked over the past few years. In emails and text messages sent to supporters earlier today, in which Obama announced that he would be filing papers to launch the 2012 campaign, the video below was promoted. Twitter, for whatever reason, seems to be not that big a deal for the campaign. All Facebook: STUDY: Millennials Prefer Facebook Politicking http://allfacebook.com/study-millennials-prefer-facebook-politicking_b37412 Jackie Cohen March 31, 2011

Facebook is the most effective way for politicians to reach 19- to 29-year-old Americans, according to a new survey by the Harvard University Institute of Politics. The survey found that 27 percent of 19- to 29-year-olds called Millennials by marketers in the U.S. believe Facebook, other social media and blogs together have more of an impact than any kind of in-person advocacy in election campaigns. Usage of Facebook by millennials has grown to 80 percent from 64 percent over the past year, and 90 percent of all of the current college students polled by Harvard have accounts on the social network. Growth in Facebook usage outpaced that of Twitter by a three-to-one ratio among those surveyed by Harvard. The percentage with accounts on the microblogging site grew from 15 percent to 24 percent over the past year. Some 2,091 millennials participated in the poll. Its interesting, but necessarily surprising, how a poll overtly intended to measure political opinions oh yeah, millennials approval of President Barack Obamas performance went up had to give so much of its focus over to Facebook. Readers, what do you think of these findings? Boston.com: Pawlenty accounted presidential exploratory committee http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2011/03/ap_pawlenty_ann.html Glen Johnson March 21, 2011 WASHINGTON Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty is taking the first formal step today toward a presidential run, putting him in front of the pack of potential candidates. Pawlenty announced through a video posted on his Facebook page this afternoon that he is forming a presidential exploratory committee. The committee allows him to begin raising money for a presidential race, even while not technically being a formal candidate. The video shows Pawlenty in St. Paul, Minn., dressed in a beige jacket that is strikingly familiar to the barn jacket Scott Brown wore to victory in Massachusetts (Browns was made by Golden Bear Sportswear; Pawlentys clearly has a Carhartt label). The heavily produced video also shows Pawlenty shaking hands, posing for pictures, and skating on an ice rink. There is a brighter future for America, he says at one point, with soaring music in the background. We know what we need to do: grow jobs, limit govt spending, and tackle entitlements. Today, Im announcing the formation of an exploratory committee to run for president of the United States, he says toward the end, as fighter planes blast through the sky and fireworks go off. Join the team, and together well restore America. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich previously declared he intends to form an exploratory committee at some future date, likely in May.

Pawlenty has already traveled to New Hampshire and hired aides to work on a campaign, but the committee step is the next available to candidates to earn free media coverage in advance of a pomp-filled formal announcement. The announcement also reflects the new-media tools available to candidates, in how they choose to make major political news. Rather than staging a press conference or addressing supporters in a ballroom, Pawlenty is choosing to weigh in on the most popular social networking site. Be sure to visit my Facebook page today at 3 p.m. ET for a special message exclusive to Facebook supporters, Pawlenty posted this morning on his Facebook page. He sent a similar message out on his Twitter feed. Politico: Time Pawlenty forms 2012 presidential exploratory committee http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=D9DD8032-B138-F909-071F76CB14B1FBB5 Kendra Marr March 21, 2011 Tim Pawlenty launched his presidential exploratory committee Monday afternoon, formalizing a campaign for the GOP nomination that hes been methodically working toward for well over a year. Join the team, the former two-term Minnesota governor said in a video message on his Facebook page. Together, well restore America." Against a montage of fluttering American flags, factory workers, foreclosures and his hometown of South St. Paul, Pawlenty talked about hardship and struggle. And he previewed his platform for a brighter future. We know what we need to do: grow jobs, limit government spending and tackle entitlements, he said against the kind of soaring soundtrack that has become typical of his movie-trailer style campaign videos. We need to encourage the dreamers and innovators, the small business owners, the hard workers, the brave men and women throughout this countrys history that have asked for nothing more than the freedom to work hard and get ahead without government getting in the way. For the last eight years, thats just what I did here in Minnesota. An Internet announcement is nothing new, but a Pawlenty aide called it a nod to the increasing role of Facebook in peoples lives, especially as its aided pro-democracy protests around the world. As we seek to turn the tide of history here in America, we chose Facebook because a community of motivated citizens will be central to the success of our efforts, the aide told POLITICO. It also underscores our commitment to using technology to creatively communicate with people and run a campaign that connects with people on their own terms." Pawlenty, the first bona fide Republican contender to form an exploratory committee, began hyping his exclusive message Monday morning on Twitter and Facebook. But by the time his video was posted online, the campaign had already allowed news to leak out through a conference call he held with supporters Monday morning. Forming an exploratory committee allows Pawlenty to begin raising money that can directly fund a presidential race, unlike the millions he's collected through his various state and federal PACs over the last couple years.

Pawlenty's camp is also expected this week to announce new hires in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire. Long-shot presidential hopefuls Buddy Roemer and Herman Cain have also formed exploratory committees, but Pawlenty is the first contender to do so. Newt Gingrich has said he's "testing the waters" a legal and semantic couch that's one small step away from a formal committee. Pawlenty enters a wide-open field of White House hopefuls. It includes possible candidates who have run before like Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, as well as presidential newcomers like Michele Bachmann and Jon Huntsman. But he faces an uphill as one of the hopefuls that is less known by Republican voters: Almost six in 10 GOPers said they didn't know enough about him to have an opinion in a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll. Pawlenty, 50, has long been considered an all-but-certain presidential candidate, with a heavy travel schedule that has repeatedly taken him to the early voting states. He's been winding down the cash-on-hand in his various federal and state political action committees, money that can't be used to directly fund a White House bid. With a softer rhetorical style that he couples with strong pitches to each constituency of the conservative movement, Pawlenty has positioned himself as the candidate of all things to all GOP voters. Hes addressed a recent Tea Party Patriots conference, rallied evangelical audiences in Iowa and attended small house parties in New Hampshire. Pawlenty is comfortable at pizza parties with College Republicans and playing a pickup game of hockey. In a recent swing through South Carolina, he talked to a local Republican club and met with Gov. Nikki Haley. At the same time, his wife Mary Pawlenty, has become a familiar face on the stump. Recently she stood by him during in a two-day trip through New Hampshire. Mary, an evangelical Christian who inspired her husband to convert from Catholicism, also joined her husband in Iowa for the inaugural presidential lecture series sponsored by The FAMiLY Leader. "After 23 years of marriage you know everything about this person," she told the crowd of evangelical voters. "You know the core of who they are and you know their heart. And while I believe Tim is the strongest and one of the smartest people I've ever met, he's also the kindest. True that image of Minnesota nice, Pawlenty has been reluctant to attack other likely 2012 contenders. He tiptoes around criticism of Sarah Palin, who beat him to become John McCains vice presidential pick in 2008. Hes avoided lambasting Mitch Daniels proposed truce on social issues. And hes brushed off repeated questions about the Massachusetts health care law that has conservatives so suspicious of Mitt Romney. "You guys just can't let this one go, can you?" Pawlenty told reporters gathered for his visit to a New Hampshire hospital. "I'll just tell you what I stand for, and what I do, and so I've given you my Minnesota approach. There's going to be a lot of time to discuss these issues, and I know you're very interested in this angle, but I just took a different approach than Massachusetts." Pawlenty started his political career on his hometowns city council. He went on to spend a decade in the Minnesota House, serving as majority leader, then serve two terms as governor. According to techPresident, a politics and technology blog, Pawlenty got about 2,000 Facebook likes between hyping his Facebook message and the announcements wrap a 3 percent growth.