What is the Internet useful for in political campaigns?

The general consensus of many of the “old guard” political consultants that I have come in contact with is that the Internet is not a successful tool for driving messages. This group believes that the best way to promote a campaign’s messages is through earned media and paid advertisements on television, cable, radio or print media. Messaging is considered the top priority of campaigns and is central to the majority of their actions. Part of this disbelief regarding the Internet’s potential among “old guard” consultants certainly derives from a fear that they can’t control their message online (something that has been debated online since the Dean campaign). However, many consultants believe that, regardless of online message control, it is impossible to convince people of anything through Internet tactics.

There isn’t a political consultant in their right mind who would advocate completely ignoring the Internet. However, the Internet is not considered to be the top priority in lower budget campaigns because political consultants don’t see evidence that the Internet can convince people that their candidate/cause is better than their opponent’s.

The real question boils down to this: What kind of medium is the Internet? Is it a reach medium? Or is it a reinforcement medium?

To clarify, I consider a reach medium to be one where a message distributed on the medium reaches and is consumed by a population of people. Thus, if the message is effective and the consumer is receptive, the message will impact the person’s opinion on the matter at hand. Television and the radio are the best examples of reach mediums. They both amass large audiences and more importantly they affect the opinions and decisions made by those consuming them.

Whereas, a reinforcement medium is one where people explicitly seek out opinions similar to their own and through consumption strengthen those opinions. Niche publications and ideologically affiliated publications are the best example of reinforcement media. There is certainly an argument to be made that certain television channels and radio stations are reinforcement media. However, as a whole I view media to fall on a spectrum falling somewhere in between a pure reach medium and a pure reinforcement medium.

“Old guard” political consultants would argue that based on people’s online habits, they use the Internet to reinforce preexisting opinions, rather than seeking out information from both sides of an issue in order to choose a stance. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been an academic study based on whether or not the opinion of “old guard” political consultants is accurate on this issue.

As such, one of IPDI’s next major research projects will be to look into the political information consumption habits of people. I believe any research must combine survey data similar to the Pew Internet & American Life Project with a controlled experiment that specifically watches people’s consumption habits.

We are looking for input on how such a study could be conducted. My current thoughts entail giving people a news story about a topic such as the economy, global warming or foreign affairs. Following the article the research subject would be provided with a list of stories from a variety of ideologically coded news sources, which they would be required to click on at least one. The experiment would be preceded and followed by a questionnaire regarding their views on the issues at hand, in order to determine how their opinion changed over the course of the exercise.

Do you think an experiment in this style would work? Do you have any ideas to improve the study? Please email me at akellner@ipdi.org.

Caveat: If the Internet is jus t a reinforcement medium, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There is fairly substantial anecdotal evidence that the Internet is very successful at rallying the base and invoking them to take action. A recent example is the number of people who have volunteered for the Obama campaign that was initiated and often carried out entirely online.

[cross posted at http://alexkellner.com]

Last week, Nate Wilcox of the Webstrong Group spoke to one of my graduate classes. Wilcox’s lecture entitled “Confessions of an Internet Hack,” overviewed the history of politics and the Internet. While much of the lecture wasn’t news to me as an avid follower of Internet politics, Wilcox said one thing that really struck me. Throughout the lecture he “named” each of the elections, and his title for the current election cycle was perhaps the best metaphor to describe the state of the current political Internet that I have come across.

Wilcox’s metaphor began by talking about the 2006 election. He discussed the innovations in mobilizing, messaging and fundraising online that were made in the election cycle. He compared these innovations to rock and roll bands in the late 1960s and early 1970s like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd. Moving on to the 2008 election cycle Wilcox said that The Beatles are to 2006 as Foghat is to 2008. In other words, no one would suggest that Foghat revolutionized the music scene or was even particularly innovative, but, regardless of that fact, they sold out gigantic arenas throughout the mid to late 1970s. The metaphor carries over to Internet politics because while very little innovation has happened online this election cycle (with perhaps the exception of the use of social networks), the effects of old innovations have had made a larger splash because the people are online in larger numbers (just as people were hooked on the rock and roll scene for Foghat).

I think when you look at the oft-pointed to evidence for why 2008 is “the first real Internet election” it backs Wilcox’s characterization. Ron Paul’s money bomb, Obama and Clinton’s online fundraising prowess, Obama’s offline movement with online roots and the campaign’s webpages themselves are all just extensions of developments that occurred in the 2006 election cycle. These events were more pronounced in 2008 because they involved more people and because they received more coverage in the press. This is not necessarily because the campaigns were doing anything drastically different; rather, there are more people comfortable with “new technology”, more people connected to the Internet and the press has become increasingly more likely to cover “Internet” stories in the mainstream press.

Now, I’m not sure that this means that we actually have reached the “first Internet election.” As a child of the millennial generation, The Beatles and Foghat were both before my time, but I have 12 hours of one of the bands and 0 minutes of the other on my iPod. The Beatles are still relevant in today’s music scene, even to someone born almost 20 years after Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released, and Foghat is largely forgotten. Perhaps this is carrying Wilcox’s metaphor slightly too far, but I predict that in 20 years, 2006 will be considered far more important year for the development of online politics than 2008. Whether or not it is “the first Internet election” is going to depend on how 2010, 2012 and beyond carry out as the Internet continues to evolve.

A few nights ago, I was invited over to one of my friend’s apartments to hang out and have dinner. While we were waiting for dinner to finish, the seven of us, all twenty and twenty-one year old college students were hanging out watching television. Sounds like a typical scenario?

Yes, until you add the fact that all seven of us were on our laptops, while watching television and four of us either had our cell phones on our laps and/or used them in the half hour before dinner was served. While this seems incredibly anti-social, and atypical, it is becoming more and more normal for my generation; a group that is called the millennials. 

The millennials, a generation group born between 1980 and 2000, grew up with the Internet and instant messaging, cell phones and text messaging, and an explosion of new forms of technology. While television, the dominant medium for the two or three generations that precede the millennials, had a large influence on our childhoods, it was battling with the Internet for our attention. This has resulted in a generation that consumes news and engages in politics in a way that is different from any generation before us.

Our consumption takes place through a large variety of different media and also generally happens with multiple forms of media at once. The millennials consume what is called “top line” information on a lot of different subjects, rather than more in-depth material on a handful of topics as is traditional with newspapers, radio and to a lesser extent television. This happens because of our typical consumption habits of using our computers, while watching television and communicating via SMS on our cell phones. However, this doesn’t mean that the millennials are becoming a generation with “trivia knowledge”, or a little information on a lot of topics; rather, once millennials read the “top line” if it engages them they choose to read more. 

So what does this mean for politics and news consumption? Well the obvious answer is that newspapers are in trouble as time progresses (something that the vast majority of the public knew anyways). However, delving further you see that the millennials are more engaged in politics and other social issues of the day than any generation since the 1960s. Last month at a Media Future Now luncheon discussion, Jack Quinn of Quinn, Gillespie and Associates, said that the youngest voting (and in some cases non-voting) cohorts are influencing their parents decisions in politics like he has never seen before. 

As the millennials continue to “grow up” and gain more power and influence into the political world, it will be interesting to see how the differing consumption norms will change how people interact and how business is carried out.

Perhaps its a signal of what Senator Obama called the “political silly season” last night, but the New York Times ran another controversial story recently. Oh, perhaps its not quite as enthralling as sexual innuendo regarding presumptive Republican nominee John McCain, but it might be enough to get a few technogeeks to fisticuffs (or at least a LAN contest of World of Warcraft).

Simply put, Barack Obama is a Mac and Hillary Clinton is a PC.

The article, remiscient of attempts to read into the Bush campaign by analyzing their bumper sticker, looks at the Web sites of the Obama and Clinton camps. The metaphor is intentional, and (for obvious reasons) the interpretations of the campaigns will line up with the media-created story arcs.

That said, there is certainly an argument being made here. As the Internet becomes ubiquitous, we will expect a smooth, classy, high-tech, user-friendly….Mac-like experience? As the generation of narcissism and self-esteem classes grows into their 20’s and 30’s, we will expect to be catered to with nice visual effects and a user-friendly, “do-not-shout” pitch.

Obama-Jobs ‘08: The Wave of the Future.

Tomorrow afternoon, IPDI will release our latest research, Poli-fluentials: The New Political Kingmakers, spearheaded by Carol Darr at the National Press Club’s First Amendment Lounge (13^th Floor, 529 14^th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20045) from 12:30 to 2:00 p.m.

The report looks at the online activism and medium consumption habits of Poli-fluentials, the people most likely to volunteer, donate, promote candidates and join causes by word-of-mouth advocacy and over the Internet.

Check out the publication at http://www.ipdi.org/Publications/default.aspx.

Register for the event by emailing ipdi@ipdi.org.

Television remains our primary medium, according to new McKinsey research (via Center for Media Research). Forty-five percent of those surveyed use television as their primary news medium – a fact that simply isn’t that surprising.

What does strike us as a bit, well, counterintuitive, are some of the reasons why survey respondents rely on television as their primary medium to get news and information.

Rationale for Choice of Primary Platform (% of respondents, multiple response OK)

56% say that they determined their “primary” medium because it is the “easiest way to get news.”

44% say that their primary medium covers the most topics.

39% say that is has the most up-to-date-info.

38% say that it allows them to multitask.

19% say that it is the most in-depth.

We like all of these options – ease of use, comprehensiveness, ability to multitask – but in our day-to-day life at the Institute, we tend to associate these terms with news and information on the Internet, not television.

The survey also contains an interesting look at three different types of news consumers: citizen readers, news lovers, and “digital cynics. Further results are available on the Center for Media Research site.