We are beginning a regular feature on the RunSmart2Win blog: Tuesdays and Thursdays will be Campaign Tip Days. We will post practical tips: straight-forward and simple, yet proven and powerful tools to add to your campaign toolbox. Just remember, if the day starts with “T”, a Tip is on the way!

Today’s tip deals with online video…make that YouTube.

1. Your campaign should be on YouTube. First of all, it’s free. (That fits nicely in your campaign budget.) Campaigns spend millions on television advertising – which is becoming less and less effective as viewers automatically skip commercials with TiVo – and YouTube is quickly catching up to TV in terms of reach and access to voters. “More people watched more video on YouTube last week than watched the top ten shows on network television” (Seth Godin, Meatball Sundae). Plus, if your YouTube video is good enough, you may even earn free TV airtime from local news channels reporting on your advertising (this happened over and over again in ’08). Candidates who do not play here miss a colossal marketing opportunity – not to mention a giant slice of the electorate.
2. What works on YouTube? Short. Authentic. Funny. Clever. Make sure every video you post is short (the shorter the better) and authentic. (Polished doesn’t work on YouTube. Real does.) And whenever possible, your videos should be funny and clever too. Joe Trippi puts it this way when discussing online video in The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: “…someday a campaign will do [unscripted, reality moments on video] to perfection, [understanding] that people – especially the young – see through the slick packaging of television and prefer seeing the world raw and unscripted, not as it’s imagined in a Madison Avenue conference room or a Hollywood studio.”
3. Put a watermark on all of your videos with the campaign web address.
4. Create a central hub for all of the YouTube videos you create. This could be the campaign website and/or a YouTube Channel under the candidate’s or the campaign’s name.
5. Encourage your volunteers and supporters to create and send in their own YouTube videos about the candidate, the election, or a campaign event (this is what Trippi is referring to above).
6. Go viral. Announce your new video to the world through social networking sites, blog posts, and emails to supporters. Encourage them to “share” the video with their friends. And give people easy methods for doing so (Digg, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter buttons; HTML code for embedding the video on blogs).

If you’ve successfully used YouTube with a past campaign, please share your stories here!

Tags: Campaign Tips, eCampaigning, online video, YouTube

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under Campaign Tips, eCampaigning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.