A lot has happened

Posted November 12th, 2008 at 12:56 AM in Journalism, Politics, Technology

This blog, which I had vowed to maintain, fell asleep as work got busy, and it stayed asleep as the election heated up.

Bad timing, I know.

Sen. Barack Obama defeated Sen. John McCain in the 2008 presidential race a week ago. It was truly moving to watch, even for a cynic like me. It seems like only yesterday that I had actually seen Obama so much in person — in high school multipurpose rooms and at moderately priced hotel conference centers — that I was tired of him. Now he is the President-elect.

Change is coming to the country, and it is coming to this blog. My specified mission here — to examine and document intersections between politics, journalism, and technology — remains unchanged, but I plan to pay more attention to the technology piece. I will try to offer some practical advice based on my experience retooling and subsequently maintaining several high-traffic news sites for the day job.

I promise not to abandon politics, which is still my favorite thing to talk about in real life, but frankly, there is less politics to talk about these days.

Here’s to better days. I promise, if you subscribe to my RSS feed now, you won’t regret it.

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Email Fundraising 1, Direct Mail 0

Posted July 8th, 2008 at 2:13 AM in Journalism, Politics, Technology

Talking Points Memo may have singlehandedly taken down GOP direct mail fundraising firm BMW Direct for charging ridiculous fees (perhaps selectively) and — worse — for deceiving clients. The way TPM has reported the story will be a textbook study in online journalism going forward, because their execution — timing, reaction, writing style, etc. — have been pitch perfect.

And no, a direct mail firm isn’t on the same level as Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, but that became too big a story to credit one online news outlet with everything. The BMW Direct story is all TPM’s.

My reaction to the allegations? I’m not shocked.

Perhaps to those who are used to watching politics on a national stage, who haven’t gotten their hands dirty in races that don’t get the media spotlight, consultants ripping off candidates is a new phenomenon. But away from all the attention, it happens all the time.

Uninitiated candidates who try to navigate the terrain of a campaign alone are unbelievably easy marks.

Among other lessons campaigns can learn from the story is this: the more a campaign can use the Internet to cut out vendors and consultants, the better. Email fundraising will put companies like BMW Direct out of business, or it will at least prevent them from inflating production and delivery costs, since those are effectively zero online.

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Who benefits from the pro-Hillary, anti-Obama movement online?

Posted July 7th, 2008 at 11:41 PM in Politics, Technology

There has been a lot of chatter about the supposedly large contingent of Hillary Clinton supporters who refuse to back Barack Obama in the 2008 general election. They’re a vocal group, but it turns out some of them might have ulterior motives.

Yesterday, I happened upon IOwnMyVote.com, one of the many online petition sites organized around the anti-Obama Clinton supporters. The petition asks for basic contact information, just as all online petitions do, becuase online petitions are really only useful to organizations insofar as they help build up an email list. (For more on that, see below.)

But the petition’s owner doesn’t keep the contact information for himself; he or she forwards it to the presidential campaigns. Sounds like it’s supposed to be nonpartisan and honest, right? Wrong. Only one of the candidates — John McCain — stands to gain anything from the arrangement. Read the rest of this entry »

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In politics, the value of an email address is difficult to quantify

Posted July 5th, 2008 at 8:38 PM in Politics, Technology

One of the most popular strategies for selling something online involves the use of an opt-in email list. Rather than pay to send somebody to a page where they have two choices — buy product or don’t buy product — you give them a third option: sign up for more information. You can incentivize signups in many ways (e.g., “free 10-page information pack sent instantly to your email,” or “sign up to receive a coupon for 10% off”), and you get to contact anybody who signs up by email a theoretically unlimited number of times.

Conventional wisdom is that it takes 7 “asks” to get a “yes” from an average customer buying an average product. I don’t know where that number came from, but it’s still true that an email opt-in is worth money to a seller. And most sellers can quantify exactly how much a new email address is worth to them by taking their profit on a sale and multiplying it by the likelihood that somebody will buy their product after receiving their series of automatically generated emails. For instance, I’ve run marketing projects where I’ve assumed the value of an email address to be about $1. But I was selling crap and making crap money, so that number can get significantly higher.

In politics, it’s harder to quantify the value of an email address. Barack Obama’s proprietary social networking web site has about 1 million members, his online donor rolls have swelled to over 1.5 million, and the total size of his email list is unknown (GOP tech guru Patrick Ruffini thinks it’s 4 to 8 million). What we do know is that only a small fraction of supporters on a candidate’s email list will ever make a donation. Whether we’re talking 1% or 15% depends on a lot of variables for which there aren’t obvious controls, but Obama’s ratio of email list recipient to donor is almost certainly higher than any candidate on his level. Read the rest of this entry »

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Coming soon

Posted July 5th, 2008 at 5:41 AM in Journalism, Politics, Technology

Sorry for the delay. For more about me, go here.

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