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.

Calling Harrison Ford.

The White House is under attack. It’s time for the President to heroically start dropping terrorists with an Uzi rifle, defending the Executive Mansion for God, family and country…perhaps even bellowing “Get out of my house!” before strangling the last Al Qaeda villain to death with his bare hands.

Well, maybe not quite like that.

According to a post from the geeks over at bigmouthmedia, the White House may soon disappear from the search results preferred to the info-hungry public by our good friends at Google. Thanks to a technical solution devised by the White House to insure that it stays hale and healthy in search engine rankings, the robots.txt file is quite close to passing the 100kb limit, at which point Google quits reading the site.

As a result, it is now theoretically possible that, as the White House Web site grows and expands (as it, no doubt will, albiet at a slower pace that the deficit or size of government) under the next Administration…certain new pages added to the White House’s online parking space may no longer emerge on our search results.

Perhaps, aside from the inevitable promises for a middle-class tax cut coming from all corners in the 2008 election, it might be time for a candidate to take the hard pledge to cut down the size of their Web site.

Who doesn’t use a search engine at least once an hour, if not more frequently, over the course of an average work day?

What was life like before we could access information in real time with few taps on a keyboard? (Actually, I caught a glimpse of what life might be like before search engines during this week’s episode of Flight of the Concords, when the band’s manager can’t call Quincy Jones because he doesn’t have a proper computer, much less a functioning Internet connection, but I digress.)

Search engines give us almost immediate access to almost comprehensive amounts of data. They make life easier, and, most importantly, they’re free.

They also know a heck of a lot about you. Most search engine capture your IP address and an identifier for your web browser (stored in a cookie) in addition to the content within your search query. They use that information to target advertising to you, which in turn helps keep search engines free, and improve the quality of the search engine, which keeps them mostly effective.

A few months ago, Google announced that it was the first search engine to publish a data retention policy. Beginning in December 2007, Google will “anonymize” your search engine data after 18 months – if you don’t return to the site.

Most search engines companies since then have developed similar policy, mostly in response to the European Union’s data protection authorities, and most have vowed to anonymize your data 13-18 months after your last visit to the search engine.

Yesterday, the Center for Democracy & Technology released its working paper on Search Privacy Practices:

Many of the Internet’s most amazing innovations are supplied for free thanks to advertising, but the mere presence of advertising-related demands does not justify overlooking privacy concerns.

CDT recommends a federal privacy law that will “protect citizens from bad actors” who may use your personal information for more than just search marketing.

Can search engines evolve without capturing and maintaining your information for a year and a half?

Here’s another the question: How much is your privacy worth? Is it worth less than the convenience of being able to download information when you want it on your time?