On April 19-20, 2010, grassroots solutions attended the annual Politics Online Conference (POLC) in Washington, DC. For two days, we roamed the halls and ballrooms of the Washington Marriott, eating snacks provided by sponsor AOL (who was sporting a new logo) and picking and choosing sessions to attend from a wide variety of programming. Here are a handful of our takeaways from the conference:
1. Offline/Online integration: With one or two exceptions, very few panelists spoke about the need to leverage online engagement through offline strategies — despite a lot of chatter about how we all need to solve the challenges of sustainability and relationship-building. Interestingly, the best example of an organizing effort that successfully integrated offline and online strategies came from outside of the political world. Nic Adler, owner of the legendary LA nightclub the Roxy, gave a presentation on how the use of social media saved the Sunset Strip. Nic led a social networking-inspired movement by re-engaging his customers online and offline and by working together with other clubs on the Strip (instead of competing with them). Tweet-crawls, Sunset Strip-wide concerts, a highly influential taste-making army of online evangelizers, and other community-building strategies have substantially strengthened the Strip’s market performance, and given business owners there a greater voice with City Hall as well.
2. Email: For a second year in a row, one of the top takeaways from POLC is that email is still king in the online world. Panelists noted that businesses and organizations may have assumed that social media like Facebook and Twitter were displacing email usage, but that user surveys don’t bear that out. Text messaging, however, is a significant and growing phenomenon, and research shows that texting is rapidly becoming a preferable medium over email with some demographics. Michael Sabat from Mobile Commons mentioned that the recent study on teens and texting from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project was a real eye-opener.
3. Video: Several interesting sessions this year were dedicated to video. We learned tips about how Scott Brown’s campaign got such high impact from its video program, both in terms of the importance of the story-telling arc, and in terms of the campaign’s ferocious consistency in building-in devices for viewer interaction at the beginning, middle, and end of every video. Justin Germany talked about the power of video as agitprop (a blend of agitation and propaganda) for clients like Liz Cheney. These baiting and intensely provocative videos are created in the hopes that they will become media stories themselves and thus exponentially increase mainstream exposure for their content. Though “going viral” has the reputation of being the holy grail in video communications, several of the panelists noted that the ingredients that make for an effective viral video often do not make for effective viewer engagement over time, and stressed the importance of having clear goals and compelling visuals before chasing that dream. Videos made by your volunteers with flip cameras, or mash-ups of professionally produced video and amateur ones like Frank Chi from Chi/Donahoe+Cole/Duffey may give you a better canvas for making a personal connection, and open up greater opportunities to engage viewers over time.
4. Mobile: An interesting concept used in one of the panels on mobile politics was the notion of a “mobile pyramid.” SMS is the base of the mobile pyramid and the point of entry for most users. It also has the widest distribution. SMS is obviously most useful for calls to action, including fundraising. The second tier on the pyramid is mobile web, which has more limited distribution (depending on the user’s browser), but is increasingly being used. The top tier of the pyramid is mobile applications, which offer a rich user-experience, but have narrow distribution at this point (limited to smartphones). A good piece of advice from POLC 2010: “Your candidate WILL have a smartphone app, so start building it now!”
5. The future: Keeping a pulse on what is just a fad in the digital space and what is here to stay is no easy task. One POLC panel tried to do just that, with panelists weighing in on which sites they think will not be around next year and which are here to stay. Some predicted that Del.icio.us and Google Buzz will not be around next year, while the jury was still out on Ning (which recently changed to a subscription-only service). On the other hand, most panelists felt that sites that implement data visualization and geolocation are here to stay. Tyler Gray at The Bivings Report, who produced his own top ten list from POLC 2010, thinks that not all of the multitude of location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla will survive. Only time will tell…
6. Augmented reality: Speaking of the future… one of the most interesting sessions focused on augmented reality and its future potential impact on politics. Augmented reality combines GPS and visual depiction of information. While it is currently being used mainly in the gaming world, a couple of early political adopters include the Republican canvassing application, Walking Edge, and a geocaching voting game in the works (by an undisclosed source). According to panelist Whurley, the software is way ahead of the hardware, but it looks like once the hardware catches up, the possibilities will be great.
7. Google search on Election Day: Josh Koster at the online strategy firm Chang + Koster offered this provocative observation: “The number of people Googling candidates while they’re standing in line at the polls is staggering. If you’re in a lower profile race, it’s probably the cheapest way to reach voters ever devised. You’re literally getting them while they’re standing there about to go into the voting booth.” Koster said he observed the search trend in a handful of races in 2009 and it’s particularly relevant for down-ballot candidates with low name ID. If a voter hasn’t even heard your candidate’s name, much less know anything about their campaign, a search ad targeted to mobile devices might be the difference between a voter actually weighing in at the bottom of the ballot or not. (Thanks to Shane D’Aprile for reminding us about this nugget.)
For anyone who could not attend the conference, some of the sessions were covered by CSPAN and are available here. Keynote addresses in the main ballroom were broadcast live via Usteam.Tv and are available on the Politics2010 channel.