Next week, IPDI and its department at GWU, the Graduate School of Political Management, are releasing the inaugural issue of our monthly Polity & Pragmatics survey panel.  The first edition asks our panel of faculty and Council on American Politics members if conventions have outlived their usefulness. Here’s a advance look at what we will publish next week.

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40% of Americans got news and information about the 2008 campaigns on the Internet. This means more Americans have gone online to political information by this point in the election season than in all of 2004

19% go online once a week or more to do campaign-related things. This includes things like:

• Watching online videos (35%)
• Receiving emails from a campaign (23%)
• Reading candidate position papers (16%)
• Using social networking sites to engage in politics (10%)
• Reading full text of a candidate’s speech online (9%)
• Donating (8%)

Only 4% send and receive text messages about the campaign

• 74% of Obama supporters for political news and information online (compared to 57% of Clinton supporters).
• 64% watched campaign videos (compared to 43% of Clinton supporters).
• 24% signed online petitions (compared to 11% of Clinton supporters).
• 23% shared political commentaries in blogs and on other sites (compared to 13% of Clinton supporters).
• 17% made political contributions (compared to 8% of Clinton supporters).

• Plenty of Americans (92%) haven’t donated online yet. There is room for growth.
• People like video. It’s the one activity that most people participate in online.
• There is little or no research on how people use the social networking applications built into the candidates’ websites. I suspect we won’t see much of this information coming out of the campaigns and the end of things, but future research on this area will be very interesting to the poli-tech community. How many supporters use the sites regularly? How many of those users donate and volunteer (and in what amounts) compared to non-users? Are users more likely to vote?

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.

This year, IPDI is teaming with our favorite GW publication, the student-run political science quarterly GW Discourse, to produce the inaugural edition Politics & Technology Review. The deadline is slightly over a month away.
More Information:

The Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet (www.ipdi.org) and GW Discourse are currently requesting submissions to Politics & Technology Review, an annual publication whose inaugural issue will be released at the 2008 Politics Online Conference (http://polc.ipdi.org).

The deadline for submissions is Friday, January 11, 2008. Guidelines and instructions can be found at http://polc.ipdi.org/uploadedfiles/GWD-IPDI-Instructions.pdf.

Articles can run up to 5,000 words in length and should look at one or more of the many intersections between technology and politics. For more information, view our memo titled Instructions for Authors (insert url) with further information about submission requirements and the review process.

Unfortunately, IPDI and GW Discourse cannot accept articles that do not meet the requirements in the Instructions for Authors attachment. These requirements aren’t intended to be cumbersome or prevent you from authoring insightful, creative pieces. Rather, we designed them to help us insure that potential authors do not waste their time on marketing and advertising pieces and that our editorial staff does not waste its time reading them.

POLC 2008 will be held on March 4 & 5, 2008. Registration is available at https://www.online-donation.com/ipdi-polc/.

Articles and questions can be submitted to Chris Wimbush, director of the IPDI Ideas series and publisher of GW Discourse, at cwimbush@ipdi.org. Read the author instructions before you submit. They can be found at http://polc.ipdi.org/uploadedfiles/GWD-IPDI-Instructions.pdf.

This afternoon I sat on a panel at Brookings Institution titled Bloggers, Buzz and Sound Bites: Innovative Media Approaches to Humanitarian Response. Given the title, I expected to hear a lot about, well, blogs. Perhaps a little about YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and social media sites.

Certainly, there was plenty of that kind of talk, thanks largely to presentations by Save Darfur, International Rescue Committee, Rendon Group, and ReliefWeb.

But there was also something else. Something I’m not used to hearing in political circles.

During her presentation on how Save Darfur meets its communications goals online, Colleen Connors mention paid online advertising.

Aha. This is different. Most of the discussions I like to attend and many of the topics I like to encourage at IPDI look using technology to create community. Marketing is passé. Communicating and community are trendy. After all, community is a warm topic. I feel good talking about it – the way Prius drivers must feel next SUVs. Community is where it is at – especially when that community does something.

According to Connors, paid online marketing has helped Save Darfur reach out to potential members of the community and sign up for their email list. Outreach efforts then transfer to cultivating the registered members of that community.

Perhaps I wasn’t listening. There is something to online advertising.

Tonight, IPDI is hosting an event titled When Idealism Isn’t Enough: Selling Online Politics in a Broadcast Era. At the event, we’ll announce that IPDI is developing a new publication, a set of practical best practices for online political advertising.

We want to explore the topic rigorously, marrying research with anecdotal knowledge and practical, political applications. The publication will be released at our 2008 Politics Online Conference.

It’s a new topic for me. That’s why I’m looking for your feedback. What are you doing? Where have you succeeded? Failed? Send me your thoughts at ipdi.@ipdi.org, and you will be able to help me shape the publication.

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.

Community. Immediacy. Anonymity. Openness. Video. Communication.

These are things that appeal to us about the social web – whether updating our personal Facebook profiles or looking at how individuals use technology to engage in political activity. Sometimes, however, it is interesting to get a different perspective.

That’s why we find a new report by GW’s Homeland Security Policy Institute (HSPI) and UVA’s Critical Incident Analysis Group (CIAG) so interesting.

NETworking Radicalization: A Counter-Strategy looks at how the Internet has been used as an active and passive outreach tool for terror networks – and how the social web can be used to begin to counteract radicalization.

Extremists have come to value the Internet so highly that some “jihadists” have adopted the slogan “keyboard equals Kalashnikov.”

HSPI’s suggestions for developing a counter-strategy starts with looking at how the extremist narrative is understood, how it is crafted and adapted, and how it is targeted and then using online grassroots activity to challenge the terrorist narrative.

Interested in reading more? Check out HSPI director Frank J. Cilluffo testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs last week.

According to Cilluffo,

Cyberspace is now the battlefield and the “war” is one of ideas. Our adversaries currently have firm possession of the battlefield because they understand this shift and have crafted and disseminated a narrative that resonates and has served both to energize and expand their ranks. Internet chat rooms are now supplementing and replacing mosques, community centers and coffee shops as venues for recruitment and radicalization by terrorist groups like al Qaeda. Real time, two-way dialogue of chat rooms has taken the fight global, enabling extremist ideas to be shared, take root, be reaffirmed and spread exponentially.

For a different perspective, check out Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Sure, it’s a work of fiction. But Stephenson offers an interesting look at the way ideology spreads online.

Portions of the blogosphere have been chattering over the weekend about the release of publication that gauges the political influence of blogs on Capitol Hill.
Last spring, Neil Sroka, then a senior in the University Honors and the Ensonian Fellowship Programs at GW, sent a survey to every Congressional office to gauge their online activity. Of the responses, here’s what he found:

• About 90 percent said that their office reads blogs.
• The most-read blog is (not surprisingly) Daily Kos, followed by Wonkette and Talking Points Memo
• 64 percent of Congressional staff readers say “blogs are more useful than mainstream media for identifying future national political problems and debates.”

While it is unclear of if and how this blog readership effects the policy that is made, there is no doubt that there is an impact. Read the rest of Neil’s research here, titled “Understanding the Political Influence of Blogs: A Study of the Growing Importance of the Blogosphere in the U.S. Congress.”

Very pleased to announce that we are adding a new breakout panel to the conference agenda. The tutorial-style panel, From TV Screen to Inbox: Creating an Integrated Political Marketing Approach, will provide a fun, hands-on look at integrating offline and online advertising campaigns. Our experts will walk through how to use real-life, traditional advertising assets (direct mail, Web video, e-mail Web sites) and show how and why it makes sense to add an integrative online component to existing advertising efforts.

MSHC (http://www.mshcdirect.com/) is sponsoring the panel, and Michael Bassik, vice president for Internet advertising, is our first confirmed speaker.

Tutorial panels will function differently than the typical Politics Online Conference breakout panel. Tutorials are designed to walk you through an idea, process, or tool. Think more like an interactive learning experience, less like a discussion panel.

Check out more panel descriptions at http://polc.ipdi.org/Agenda/default.aspx.

Perhaps the real magic in online politicking occurs behind the scenes. E.Politics tells us why:

Where electronic politics seems to be making a real difference is behind the scenes, in the decisions campaigns are making about which voters to contact and how to reach them.

Basically, it’s all about the databases, which the Republicans are masters of using. Particularly, they are terrific at cross-referencing voter databases with consumer marketing databases to find likely supporters in unlikely places and target them with finely-honed messages.

If you’re doing something interesting with databases this election, we’d love to hear your story — whether it’s updating your databases, conducting niche marketing, or going door-to-door with PDAs. Tell Julie what you’ve been up to at ipdi@ipdi.org.