CRAFT on Fox News
CRAFT partner, Brian Donahue, talks to Fox News’ John Scott and gives his reaction to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll showing Americans in an anti-incumbent mood leading up to the 2010 midterm elections.
Brian Donahue on Fox News from CRAFT on Vimeo.
All About the Numbers
House Republicans announced last week their twitter new media challenge similar to “March Madness” in an effort to attract new followers to Republican Member’s of Congress.
The idea is simple: Get more people to follow each Republican Member of Congress thus increasing the GOP’s ability to get its message out. In theory this is a great idea, engaging those who use twitter and highlighting the party’s willingness to reach out to a growing online community.
The problem however is this challenge is based solely on numbers. Building numbers or followers, while excellent, should be about the value you provide to those who do follow you. It should be about being unique and engaging your readership not simply getting readers for the sake of saying you’ve got the most.
Social media is meant to be social. Trying to gain as many followers as possible, and then having no game plan to keep them engaged afterwards is a strategy we see too often.
Twitter isn’t going anywhere anytime soon and the House challenge will almost certainly yield tangible results. However, once Members of Congress build their list, the real challenge has just begun. Communicating with and being relevant to your audience is the hard part.
Without a concrete strategy to engage your audience, all the followers in the world won’t do you any good
GOP Outguns Dems Online in Congressional Races
In an article in ClickZ the issue of online advertising is explored. As pointed out, Republicans are “outgunning their Democratic counterparts” due to what CRAFT Partner Matthew Dybwad explains is “they hold the majority in the House, congressional Democrats are less compelled to make sure they’re at the top of their digital games.”
By Kate Kaye, ClickZ
Washington, D.C.–Republican congressional candidates are outgunning their Democratic counterparts, at least in one arena: online advertising.
Consultants on the right and left, along with digital media sellers, say Republican House candidates are serious about using Web ads and other online efforts this midterm election season. They suggest key factors include the desire to take back the majority in that chamber, complacency among Democrats, and even attitudes among party leadership.
“Republicans are throwing the gauntlet down,” said Andrew Roos, account executive, AdWords, Google elections and issue advocacy, speaking during a panel on online ad targeting at the Politics Online conference in Washington, D.C. this morning.
Brian Rosenberg, senior account executive at Cox Cross Media, pegs the GOP-to-Democrat House candidate ratio at 3 to 1. He’s getting calls from Republican media buying agencies that are sending out proposals for primary campaigns. Rosenberg chalks it up, at least in part, to an “underdog” mentality among GOP candidates.
“They’re realizing this is a medium that really has not been utilized much…now in this midyear election cycle, we’re seeing a lot more,” he said. Rosenberg said some Republican congressional and gubernatorial campaigns expect to spend as much as $9 million on online advertising.
Digital campaign consultants serving candidates on both sides of the aisle affirm the trend. Republican Matthew Dybwad, partner at Craft Media Digital, a consultancy serving Republican campaigns, suggested that because they hold the majority in the House, congressional Democrats are less compelled to make sure they’re at the top of their digital games. He also implied that Republican party leaders have stressed the importance of using online ads, and the Web in general.
To read the entire article click here.
Googling at the Polls
CRAFT Partner Matthew Dybwad was recently included in the blog post below from Politics Magazine from the recent Politics Online Conference in Washington, D.C. Dybwad was featured on a panel on the subject of utilizing Google to maximize your internet strategy.
Written by Shane D’Aprile, Politics Magazine
Looking for a way to grab the attention of those really late decision makers? Think about targeting Google search to reach voters who are waiting in line at the polls. It’s not quite a network blast, but for a down ticket campaign it could be key.
During a panel discussion on online political advertising Tuesday at the Politics Online Conference, Josh Koster offered this: “The number of people Googling candidates while they’re standing in line at the polls is staggering,” said Koster, managing partner at the online strategy firm Chong + Koster. “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.
To read the rest click here.
Are You “Kicking Your Own Ass”?
Mark Cuban has a great post up at Blog Maverick titled, “Why You Should Never Listen To Your Customers.” In it he relates the tale of a company with which he was involved. The company asked its customers what features they would like to see in the product while the competition just went ahead and innovated. When the two products were released the competitor’s product rocked.
Cuban’s company again went to the customers and asked what features they’d like to see, and most of the features they listed were the features their competitor now had.
His takeaway is simple. Someone is going to “kick your ass.” Will it be you? Or your competitors?
While his is a tale of business, the fact is this story could apply to countless campaigns and political organizations. If you’re too busy navel gazing, or too caught up in what the other guy has that you don’t, you’ll lose site of your mission.
We saw this during the run up to 2008. Online, the GOP was caught in an endless circle of “what we’re doing wrong” and “how we can change to be more like the Democrats.” I was one of those pointing out our deficiencies. Had you asked most GOP consultants what “features” they wanted in 2008, they would have pointed to the things the Dems were doing – ACTBlue, TPM, CAP, etc, etc.
When the Washington Post ran a page one, above-the-fold story quoting me saying the GOP was losing online, I had the same epiphany Cuban had. I was guilty of letting the other guy kick my ass. I decided we needed to kick our own ass, instead.
Many GOP organizations are still in the same boat as Cuban’s company. Instead of innovating, they’re mimicking the competition. They say, “We want a website like Barack Obama’s” instead of asking what’s next.
Engineering legend Alan Kay said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” That’s true in politics as well as technology. The GOP needs to invent the future, not build to the past.
Reinventing the Tools of Politics
Menachem Wecker at GW Today highlights CRAFT’s GW connection…
Mr. Donahue, an adjunct professor at GW’s Graduate School of Political Management, is a founder and managing partner of CRAFT Media Digital, a political consulting firm in the District, which works with primarily conservative clients including political candidates, public affairs firms, nonprofits and media outlets.
Two other CRAFT co-founders and co-partners are GW alumni: Matthew Dybwad, B.A. ’99, and Justin Germany, M.A. ’03. Daniel Huey, B.B.A. ’10, is an account executive at the firm.
…while also delving into CRAFT’s approach to marketing communication…
According to Mr. Dybwad, CRAFT’s strength comes from the diversity of its partners’ areas of expertise and its decision to educate people about best communications practices rather than promote itself. CRAFT uses its blog to share those ideas. Recent posts have focused on identifying and creating “compelling content,” avoiding the error of treating e-mail like direct mail and the ways “Your Newsletter Is Killing Your List.”
“Instead of having a Web site that’s full of hundreds of pages of marketing-speak about why we are so great, we can show people that we know what we are doing by teaching them how it’s done,” Mr. Dybwad says. “The site traffic perpetuates itself, because people look at it as a resource that is useful to them.”
Do you have compelling content?
Most people who want websites think all their content is compelling. ”I’m putting information about myself out there, why wouldn’t everyone want to read it?”
Right. Fewer people understand what compelling content is: answers, solutions, laughs, interesting narrative…
Fewer still could actually tell you if what they have is compelling based on the user experience of their website visitors. They look at traffic to their site and names in their database and end up running faster in the same direction to try to increase results, regardless of what they are doing.
Do you know good content when you see it?
Probably not. It’s a trick question. Compelling content is in the eye of the content consumer, not the producer. Different content works for different audiences. Besides, that’s the wrong question.
Do your site users know good content when they see it?
Yes. And they’re more than happy to tell you about it. Without being asked. They vote for and against your content with their mouse every time they make a decision to either keep reading your brilliant prose, try to find what they are looking for on another page, or get so fed up that they leave your site all together.
How do my users indicate what they like?
Finally, the right question. Any analytics package will show user visits, page views, where traffic came from, etc. The key is in looking not only at the most popular content items on the site in terms of views, but which pages users actually linger on, and which pages cause users to click through to other pages on the site.
Take the CRAFT site for instance. The most popular page on the site is the home page, not surprising. The next most popular page is Brian Donahue’s bio, because, hey, that guy is popular. Are these the most compelling pages on the site? Hardly.
Digging deeper into our analytics reveals two pages in particular that ring the compelling alarm bell. Our “Thinking” and “How CRAFT is Different” pages have bounce rates of 0% — no user who has ever visited these pages has navigated away from our site without visiting another page on our site. Coupled with the large number of page views to each of these pages and the relatively average time on page users spend on each page, we can conclude that these pages as much or more than any other on our site keep users interested, satisfy their curiosity, or pique it enough to continue browsing.
Of course every page is different. If you have 50 words on a page and users spend half a minute there on average, chances are some serious pondering is going on. If users are spending those same 30 seconds on a page where your site is trying to tell a story with a 3 minute video, perhaps more content optimization is needed.
This, then, is compelling content. And here we thought it was going to be our serious mugshots…
