While I don’t share Colin Delany’s political views, his blog, e.politics, is a must-read for those who work (or play) at the intersection of politics and the Internet. Colin’s articles always deliver a perfect mix of Online Politicking 101 and stand-up comedy. His latest blog entry, “How Candidates Can Use the Internet to Win 2010 (Part One)”, is no different:

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Tyler Harber wrote a helpful article in Politics Magazine last week called “All Staff, No Brains” discussing the perils of entrusting a campaign staff with overall campaign strategy. A good staff is important — no, essential. But there are dangers in relying on the staff to shape the campaign’s overarching approach, direction, message, and planning:

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I read an interesting column today by Michael Medved called “A Winning Formula for the GOP”. He argues for a “more conservative message delivered by a more moderate voice.” In the summer of Obamacare, Joe Wilson, and the Tea Party movement, is Michael Medved’s strategy a winning one or a formula for Republican retreat? You be the judge:

President Obama’s recent decline in the polls represents a comeback opportunity for Republicans, but they will squander that chance if they follow either of the two most frequently promoted strategies for party revival. The GOP’s remaining moderates want a shift to the center, while the right wing demands uncompromising, confrontational, us-vs.-them rhetoric. Both road maps will lead to political dead ends for a struggling party that actually needs a new combination of conservative substance and moderate tone.

Most obviously, there’s no reason for struggling Republicans to abandon their conservative brand in a nation that prefers the conservative label to the liberal designation in every corner of the country. A recent Gallup Poll shows more people in all 50 states who identify as conservatives than as liberals. Only in Massachusetts, Hawaii and Vermont is the contest even close. In the 2008 election, even though Barack Obama won the popular vote by seven percentage points, exit polling showed a landslide victory of 12 percentage points for self-identified conservatives over liberals.

There’s no evidence, in other words, that it would help the GOP to blur the conservative label, as suggested by centrist Republican leaders (including Sen. Arlen Specter — before he switched to the Democrats). In fact, conservatism remains vastly more popular than Republicanism. That same Gallup Poll revealed significant advantages for Democrats in party preference in 30 states and for Republicans in only four. In crucial battleground states such as Ohio, Indiana and North Carolina, those who identify themselves as conservatives outnumber liberals by 20 percentage points. Yet when identifying themselves by party in those states, Democrats top Republicans by at least 10 percentage points. To renew the party, Republicans need to identify themselves more clearly with conservative values, not less so.

Political warfare

This recognition leads to the other commonly expressed (and misguided) formula for reviving the Republican Party: a new emphasis on hyperpartisan, take-no-prisoners political warfare against the Obama regime. According to nearly all my talk radio colleagues, this sort of full-throated denunciation of the president’s alleged “march to socialism” mobilizes the nation’s permanent conservative majority.

Unfortunately, that majority doesn’t exist — not even in the most reliably red states. Nowhere (not even in Alabama or Utah) do self-styled “conservatives” number more than 50%, which means that even with solid right-wing support, the GOP still needs some moderate backing to win. Yes, conservatives greatly outnumber liberals, but the number of self-described “moderates” dwarfs both the other groups. Success among this “mushy middle” (44% of the electorate, according to exit polls) turned the election to Obama, not conservative disillusionment with John McCain. Even if the GOP nominee had won every single conservative vote cast for the victorious George W. Bush in 2004, he still would have lost the election decisively because Obama crushed him among moderates by 21 percentage points.

On the surface, this centrist landslide for the Democrats makes no sense, since Obama compiled a voting record as the most liberal U.S. senator, while McCain earned a reputation as an independent-minded maverick. Why, then, did moderate voters prefer Obama in such overwhelming numbers?

The answer involves his moderate tone, not the ideological substance of his program. As the clear front-runner from the time he locked up the nomination, Obama could emphasize gauzy themes of “hope” and “change” and avoid resorting to angry rhetoric. Republicans, on the other hand, played catch-up throughout the campaign, adopting a style that struck the public (according to surveys) as more negative than their Democratic opponents. Attempts to raise the issue of Obama’s one-time friendship with radical Bill Ayers, or Joe the Plumber’s warnings of socialism, only served to make the GOP ticket look immoderate, despite the fact that its issues positions were, if anything, more mainstream and less ideological than the Democratic platform.

History and recent polling send clear messages regarding the right strategy for rebuilding the GOP. Republicans don’t need less conservatism, and won’t benefit from a more confrontational style. They actually need more conservatism, and a less confrontational style.

They must renew the same combination that worked for Republican winners for some 30 years. Ronald Reagan never abandoned conservative positions, but his genial approach to political combat won him the moderate voters he needed for two landslide victories. Similarly, the George W. Bush slogan “compassionate conservatism” (much derided on the right) allowed him to contest moderate votes with Al Gore and John Kerry and to win two hard-fought victories.

Courting the moderates

The point to remember about those citizens in the political middle who decide every national election is that they’re the least philosophically committed, issues-oriented voters in the electorate. Interviews and conversation make it obvious that many citizens describe themselves as “moderate” because they feel uncertain of their place on the political spectrum, less engaged with the roiling controversies of the day. Moderates famously respond to personalities or atmospherics (”hope and change” or “compassionate conservatism”) more than they react to nine-point plans or detailed position papers. They also dislike strident, the other-guy-is-Hitler rhetoric because such appeals seem like a rebuke to their own uncertainty.

Republicans can’t win without rallying the plurality of Americans who prefer conservatism to liberalism, but they also can’t triumph (anywhere) with that group alone. Like Democrats, the GOP needs moderate votes for victory, and the only way to get them without sacrificing principle or core conservative voters involves deploying the same combination that has worked before: maintaining clearly conservative positions, but with those values presented in a manner that’s optimistic, constructive, reasonable and, yes, moderate.

Michael Medved is a nationally syndicated talk radio host and a member of USA TODAY’s board of contributors. He’s the author of the upcoming book The 5 Big Lies About American Business.

Barbara Krause wrote this interesting article on optimizing your organization’s press releases for the “Age of Twitter”. There are some great take-aways here for political campaigns. Here are five tips for effective “2.0″ press releases:

You’re getting ready to announce a new product or service, or you’ve just won the most coveted award in your industry. How do you get the word out? Unless you’re booked on Oprah, it’ll be with a press release.

Putting out a traditional press release in the clutter of information jamming the Internet is worse than trying to have a quiet conversation at a rock concert. Today your release needs to be optimized for the web. That’s because the web is where customers and reporters get much of their information. Consider this: Over 80% of online purchases start with a web search (Forrester Research), and online search is the number one source for journalists to obtain additional story information (Bennett & Company). Using search engine optimization (SEO), you can help ensure your press release is easily found by customers, reporters and the robots that crawl the web to deliver search results.

Here are some tips to optimize your press release:

1. Identify the search terms that will lead customers or reporters to you. Come up with all the key words and phrases that describe your company or product in the way a customer would. Forget that unique sophisticated term your marketing folks cooked up. After all, how many people would look for “custom designed sports footware” when “running shoes” would suffice? Then test your terms to see which ones are most frequently searched. Google has a free service called Google Trends where you can compare search terms to see which are most potent. Studies have found that most search queries are two to four words long, so try to keep phrases within that range.
2. Use your key words in your headline (and the body of the release). You want to make it easy for search engines to serve up your release when people type those key words. Try to use your key words within the first seven words of the headline. The CEO may insist on a boring, technical headline and story lead, which is about as web-effective as rolling up the message in a bottle and tossing it into the ocean. Google search results display only sixty-three characters of a headline, so get those words in that space (sometimes a challenge!). Google recommends headlines between two and twenty-two words for the best reach.
3. Hyperlink your key words and phrases to your website. You want people to read your release and be able to easily obtain more information, so hyperlink key words and phrases to the appropriate page on your website, your company blog or another relevant site. But don’t overdo it, or the web crawler may assume your release is spam. A good rule of thumb is not more than one hyperlink per 100 words.
4. Use multimedia. Produce a YouTube video or Flash demonstration of your product and include it in the press release. Add photos and logos to make it easy for people to visualize your product. Title them using key words so they will also be indexed in images and video sections of search engines.
5. Add magnifiers for easy distribution. Make it easy for others to forward your release to others, or to subscribe to future information from you. Include an RSS feed button, Technorati tags and a Digg button. After your release is written, how you distribute it is critical. You can carefully identify specific reporters and bloggers in advance and email them the release (never send it as an attachment). Most effective is to distribute through paid services like BusinessWire, whose Enhanced Online News service is leading the major distributors in optimized press release distribution. A less expensive option is PRWeb, although its distribution isn’t nearly as extensive as BusinessWire.

You’ll obviously post the release on your website. But give it an extra push by using social networks to extend your reach. Write a post about the news on your Facebook page or on Twitter, using http://tinyrul.com to shorten the press release’s URL so you can fit your post into Twitter’s 140 character limit. With luck, your friends and colleagues will pass your news on to others—maybe even to Oprah.

I’m reading an interesting book called Get Out the Vote by Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber. The book dissects every popular “GOTV” activity known to man, and — based on numerous experiments, field tests, and statistical analysis — rates the effectiveness of each tactic.

The chapter on phone banks is particularly interesting.

Care to make a guess as to how many calls it takes to motivate one additional voter to go to the polls from volunteers callers, professional phone banks workers, or (dum, dum, dum!…) robo calls?

I’m going to keep you in suspense until the end of this post. First, take a look at an interesting analysis of live polling versus robo call polling. (Keep in mind that this article is debating the merits of polling by phone, not turning out voters. I’ll come back to the “live versus robo” GOTV discussion, as promised, at the end of this post.)

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We’re adding a new feature to the RunSmart2Win blog: Five Questions With _______. We will talk to North Carolina’s news makers, political insiders and experts, asking them five questions — and five questions only — on politics and campaigning in the Old North State. I’m excited to bring you the first edition today: Five Questions with Peter Hans:

1. What do you like about politics? And what do you not like about politics? I like the excitement, the people, and the chance to accomplish something important. I dislike the pressures of raising money, the personal nature of many attacks, and losing.
2. What advice do you have for “the mob” (as the Democrats call them) of activists, concerned citizens, and political newcomers wanting to get involved, make a difference, or even run for office? People in our country and around the world have given their lives for freedom. But too often, we forget that democracy requires participation. So I love to see citizens, of every political persuasion, fulfill their civic responsibilities.
3. You’ve been in the trenches of some North Carolina’s biggest political battles in recent years, advising senators Lauch Faircloth, Elizabeth Dole, Richard Burr, and others. What have traditionally been “winning issues” for Republicans in North Carolina? Are these issues changing at all as the state grows, changes demographically, and becomes more urban/suburban? Traditionally our winning issues on the federal level have centered around family values, limited government, and national security. Our state is more moderate, philosophically, in years past so the tone of our political communications should reflect that reality while still staying true to our principles.
4. What will separate winning campaigns and candidates from losing ones, specifically in North Carolina, in upcoming elections? The same things that have always separated winning and losing campaigns: ideas, money, organization, and luck. The biggest difference is that “organization” used to mean yard signs and today it means social networking.
5. Do you have any predictions on the 2010 election (in the state or nationally)? I’m cautiously optimistic about 2010 even though the Republican “brand” continues to poll poorly. I believe Republicans will be energized and Democrats deflated going into next year. Our challenge now is to recruit good candidates, don’t take anything for granted, and work hard and smart.

Peter Hans provides strategic advice on government relations to business clients at SZD Wicker, a Raleigh law firm. His background in public policy, political campaigns, and media relations provides clients with a unique resource. Peter worked on Capitol Hill as senior policy advisor to former U.S. Senator Lauch Faircloth and then-U.S. Representative (now U.S. Senator) Richard Burr. He was a consultant to U.S. Senator Elizabeth Dole in her successful 2002 campaign. He was elected by the N.C. House of Representatives in 1997 to a six-year-term on the State Board of Community Colleges. Peter was elected by the N.C. Senate in 2003 to a four-year-term on the University of North Carolina Board of Governors and was re-elected in 2007 for a second term. He was elected vice chairman of the Board in 2008. Peter is currently co-chairing a $5 million capital campaign for Urban Ministries of Wake County.

If you would like to answer “Five Questions” on RunSmart2Win.com, please contact Nathan Babcock.

On Wednesday, Jessica Wood wrote about Facebook Groups, Pages, and Profiles.  Continuing with the Facebook theme, below is an excellent “tip sheet” for campaigns using Facebook to reach voters and supporters. This is an article from David All and Jerome Armstrong in Politics Magazine on “Ten Ways to Use Facebook to Get Your Message Out”:

With more than 225 million users throughout the world, Facebook has surpassed MySpace as the world’s most popular social network. Nearly every politician, political organization, product, person and non-profit are “on” Facebook—but are they using it correctly to help them achieve their online goals? To help ensure that you’re taking advantage of Facebook to do just that, here are our top 10 ways to use Facebook to get your message out…

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One of the questions I hear most often about Facebook involves the differences and advantages between profiles, pages, and groups. Facebook is growing and evolving quickly and it can be confusing at times. So, to help your group avoid confusion, here is my short and simple breakdown of who belongs where in the Facebook universe complete with a little example using my favorite North Carolina Senator.

Profiles: These are intended for individuals and their personal relationships, friends, contacts, etc. Everyone who is on Facebook has a profile and profiles are needed to set up all other accounts on Facebook.

Groups: Groups are informal and can be set up by anyone about any topic. These are best for ideas, opposition to certain bills, informal functions, etc.

Pages: Pages work best for public figures, organizations, websites, etc. Pages are more formal than profiles in the sense that they are run by the organization and function much like an extension of the group’s website. These are hands-down the best choice for most formal conservative entities (politicians, GOP groups, Conservative websites, advocacy groups, etc). For more information on pages, see “6 Tips for Building Effective Facebook Pages.”

Here’s an example of how Sen. Richard Burr could use each of the different platforms:

• Profile: Sen. Burr could set up his own profile where he could connect and interact with his friends, family members, staff, etc. Profiles are intended to be personal and work best when they are run by the person they represent.
• Page: This would be for his public presence. Ideally, Sen. Burr’s staff would treat his Facebook page as a media outlet where they could update fans on his voting record, publicize campaign stops, discuss his opposition or support for certain legislation, etc. Successful pages are frequently updated and experience a high level of fan engagement.
• Groups: A group for Sen. Burr would be set up by a staffer, friend, or supporter and would ideally be more specific. Here supporters could talk about a specific goal for Senator Burr (i.e. reelection) or their agreement of his position on a certain bill.

If the difference between Profiles and Pages is still confusing, note the different terms used for connecting with others through the two functions. On a profile, a personal connection is listed as a “friend” whereas a person who is connected to a page is termed a “fan.”  Profiles are personal. Pages are public.

There’s a lot more that goes in to deciding the best approach, but the general rule of thumb is that if you are looking to set up an official Facebook presence for your candidate or group, you need to be setting up a Facebook Page.

Jessica is the founder of Majority Connections, LLC, a new media and social networking consulting and training service for conservative groups, leaders, and activists. She is committed to seeing another conservative revolution, believing that sites like Facebook, Twitter, Ning, and Wordpress will be the tools to help us achieve majority status across the nation. Connect with Jessica on Twitter @jessicanwood or at MajorityConnections.com.

If you are interested in politics as a career, the article below from Politics Magazine has some sobering suggestions.

If this article ties your stomach up in knots, you’re probably not meant to be a political operative. But if you’re like me — and just reading about the six months of manic, caffeine-aided insanity we call campaigning makes you want to start canvassing your neighborhood right now — maybe it’s time for you to consider a career in politicking!

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Here’s a reminder of the ways you can subscribe, follow, become a fan, and connect with RunSmart2Win and like-minded conservatives committed to taking back our state and our country:

Subscribe to the RSS Feed. We’re realists. We understand that you probably don’t visit RunSmart2Win.com everyday for new blog posts. People are busy. But what if RunSmart2Win.com came to you through email or a Web notification? RSS (Really Simple Syndication) gives you this option. RSS allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from RunSmart2Win. You save time by not visiting the site’s homepage (unless the blog entry that day is especially interesting to you and you’d like to dig deeper into the content). Best of all, RSS is free! Try it for yourself and you’ll be hooked.

Follow RS2W on Twitter. Twitter is sweeping the nation. Just a few short months ago, Twitter was one of many obscure social networking sites. Today it’s the fastest-growing social media website in the world; it is quickly gaining on Facebook – and even Google — in terms of page visits and influence on the Internet. Remember during the ‘08 campaign when Democrats mocked John McCain for not using computers or PDAs? Well, he figured it out. He has over one million “followers” on Twitter (and counting). RunSmart2Win doesn’t have quite that many followers yet, but we’re trying! Don’t be left out: sign up for Twitter, “follow” RunSmart2Win, and tell us “what you’re doing now”!

Become a Facebook Fan. Facebook is the reigning king of social networking websites. It currently has more than 200 million active users worldwide. Now you can add RunSmart2Win to that list! We launched the RunSmart2Win Facebook Page last week and people are already becoming “fans”. This page is the “water cooler” of RunSmart2Win: where you can meet other people who are interested in conservative grassroots activism, network, post comments and join conversations. (And coming soon, where you can view pictures, videos, and download campaign handbooks.) We encourage you to stop by our Facebook page, become a fan, and tell your friends!