calculation at all! It is by attention to this point that I can foresee who is likely to win or lose.
– Sun Tzu The 10% figure from the Scott Brown campaign is close
to the 12% number predicted by Forrester for online adver- tising spending in the private sector for 2010. Forrester sees that number growing to 21% by 2014. This helps to show that, as a percentage of your overall campaign budget, online campaigning is not a fad that can be ignored, and doing it well means allotting some portion of your budget to it. This fact is further reinforced by Pepsi’s move to withdraw from produc- ing a Superbowl ad this year to instead concentrate on a social media marketing campaign targeting community renewal.
4) Prioritize Online Campaign Methods that can be Measured
Consultants I’ve spoken with and analysts such as Wells Far-
go estimate that at least 67% of big-budget US campaigns are spent on television commercials, yet all agree there is no real- time feedback mechanism to prove that a vote was won or lost as result of viewing a television ad. The only way to capture feedback on a television ad is to perform telephone surveys averaging $25K each within the region the ad was played. Contrast this with the online world which can track feed-
back in real-time and can tell you instantly how many people saw an ad (Google calls this “impressions”) and how many people acted on the ad (Google calls this “click-troughs”). Ads can be targeted to a region with postal code accuracy. Ads can also follow you around across websites, something that isn’t possible on television or cable. Compared to tele- vision, this kind of saturation advertising is powerful, mea- surable and relatively inexpensive. Campaign Grid (www.
campaigngrid.com) is an excellent example of an online advertising service that allows you to manage online ad campaigns across a wide variety of online ad networks, and measure the impact for you as they run. Another recent innovation is sentiment analysis, which
leverages the popular social media tool Twitter. By analyzing millions of Twitter conversations you can actually measure what people are thinking about a topic, and was recently employed by Tweetminster (
www.tweetminster.co.uk) dur- ing the most recent British election to predict a hung parlia- ment weeks in advance of the vote. Finally, mobile surveys and polls offer an instant campaign feedback mechanism. 97% of SMS messages and mobile no- tifications are read within minutes of being received. This beats traditional polling mechanisms on both speed and price, which allows you to make decisions faster than your opponent.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. – Sun Tzu
June 2010 | Campaigns & Elections 59
5) Build and Position Content to Minimize Management and Maximize Reach It’s critical that after you have spent good time and money
on developing campaign content that you leverage tech- nology effectively to spread your message, and reduce the amount of work your online team has to perform on your behalf. YouTube provides one of the best examples on how to
do this. By uploading your video content to YouTube, and leveraging their APIs, you can push that content to your website, your Facebook friends, Twitter followers and mo- bile phone users instantly. It’s also search engine optimized, allowing it to be found rapidly using online search tools. Volunteers don’t have to update 4 different sites, allowing them to save time and increase your chances of having your content shared effectively by your supporters.
Fighting with a large army under your command is nowise different from fighting with a small one: it is merely a question of instituting signs and signals.
– Sun Tzu On the flipside, Flash video content is an example of an
online campaign technology touted in years past that no longer helps you spread your message effectively. Fixed to your website, Flash isn’t search engine optimized and be- cause it isn’t supported on the leading iPhone technology, it can’t be shared in the mobile environment. Flash is also de- velopment intensive, so changes must be done by a qualified developer, and updated as Adobe changes its software.
Hence that general is skillful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skillful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.
– Sun Tzu Online campaigning is your opponent’s weakest flank;
don’t let it be yours. This rare double media shift to the online and mobile words has exposed this weakness in many traditional campaigns. With professional guidance and pru- dent budgeting it can allow you to take the field and defeat your opponent.
John Craig is the VP of Sales and Marketing at Purple Forge (
www.purpleforge.com) that provides iPhone applications to politicians, such as Tim Hudak, Chuck DeVore and Liz Carter. John was also named to the 2010 Aristotle Dream Team for Mobile Campaigning.
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