2010 promises to be a good year for conservative campaigns both in North Carolina and across the country. Whether you are running a campaign for town council or a statewide Senate campaign, Twitter can play an important role in helping you win.

I’ve compiled ten tips and observations to help conservative campaigns engage conservative voters in 2010. These important (and perhaps obvious) Twitter tips are based on what I’ve seen campaigns do and not do with their Twitter strategies in the past year.

Take a look, remember that followers are potential voters, and get tweeting!

1. Realize Successful Twitter Accounts Do Not Come Overnight.

Campaigns need to be prepared to invest in this new media tool. Twitter accounts, like all other aspects of your campaign, will require staff time and resources. Start by creating a long term Twitter strategy that focuses on reaching and educating your potential voters. As you continue, remember that successful Twitter accounts are not measured by the amount of followers you have, but the impact your message has on those you are trying to target.

2. Customize Your Twitter Account

Fill in any possible information on the Twitter Profile (name, website, and bio at minimum), including dates for primary or general elections. Create a custom background that corresponds to the branding on your website and Facebook Page or use the background space to list url information for your other social media accounts. There are multiple options for customization, but the point here is to create a Twitter profile that is engaging and informative.

3. Remember You Have a Twitter Account

This seems obvious, but I can’t tell you how many campaigns I have seen start accounts on social networks and then fail to follow through. Twitter should be your second new media priority (after Facebook), but if your campaign hasn’t developed a strategy for using Twitter, don’t launch an account yet. It does you no favors for potential voters to see a campaign Twitter account that hasn’t been updated in months. (Of course, if you are itching to start using Twitter and just can’t seem to come up with a strategy, let’s talk).

4. Know Who Is Tweeting

For most organizations, parties, groups, and online grassroots movements, I recommend keeping personal and business accounts completely separate. However, for campaigns it’s effective for candidates to show a personal side. The trick here is to make sure it’s clear who is tweeting. If campaign staff will tweet sometimes and the candidate others, create an easy way for followers to distinguish the tweets.

5. Hashtags. Use them.

Hashtags are my favorite part of Twitter because they allow you to reach new people and categorize your tweets. I am continually amazed that there are candidates running for any office, especially Congress or Senate, who are still not using hashtags. Look around and find out which hashtags your potential followers are using and use them constantly. You could also create your own hashtag and feed it to your campaign website (warning: don’t forget that anyone can tweet anything with any hashtag). Either way, encourage your supporters to retweet or tweet about you using the hashtags your campaign is using.

6. Stop Expecting People to Come to You.

Many savvy political tweeters will seek out your Twitter account, but many, many more potential supporters will not. The best way to increase your base is to follow the people you hope will follow you. My tip for finding your followers is to pick influential tweeters in your district and follow the tweeters who are following them. You might even ask those same influential tweeters to recommend people for you to follow.

7. See Follower, Think Voter

When you see the word follower, think “potential voter” and engage tweeters in every way possible. For example, thank followers for retweeting important links and encourage them to do so in the future. Consider encouraging followers to ask questions and use the Twitter account to respond to those questions. However you go about engaging your followers, remember that followers are potential voters and you need them come Election Day.

8. Use Twitter Lists

Engage and recognize your supporters by grouping them in specific Twitter lists. Consider sending the people on these lists your press releases and links to your latest blogs first. It’s likely they will appreciate the recognition and start spreading your content. Twitter lists are an easy and quick way to see what your supporters are tweeting about.

9. Know What People Are Tweeting About Your Campaign

Don’t rely on Google alerts and the Twitter @ reply function (which is unreliable at best) for Twitter reputation management. It’s important to take time to use the Twitter search function to search for your name, district, your opponent’s name, and other relevant keywords. Follow the people who are supporting you and address any questions that have been raised by other Tweeters.

10. Don’t Stop Tweeting Once You Win

Change your account name from @nameforcongress to @RepName and tweet more than ever. You will be glad you did when the next election cycle rolls around.

(This blog is also posted at MajorityConnections.com.)

Yesterday I apologized for my long absence from the blog. Today I’m going to do something unheard of in the blogesphere: promote someone else’s blog!

While I’ve pledged to pick up the pace on RunSmart2Win once more — posting about once or twice a week — I know that this isn’t enough to satisfy some of the political campaign junkies out there. So, while I hope you’ll stick around (and subscribe to our RSS feed to make reading RunSmart2Win simpler and more convenient), I strongly suggest you check out Killer Campaigning for “daily non-partisan tips for campaign junkies.”

Here’s more on Killer Campaigning:

If you’re serious about getting the best advice on running a great political campaign, then this is the site you’ve been looking for. Whether you’re running a small local campaign or a barnstorming across a state, you’ll find plenty of common-sense tips and little-known political secrets on Killer Campaigning.

The campaign tips we share on Killer Campaigning aren’t just guesswork.  These are field-tested strategies that we’ve used on numerous local, state and national campaigns . . . strategies that work.

We don’t care if you’re a Democrat, Republican, Independent or Martian . . . our advice is for everyone.  You won’t find political posturing here at Killer Campaigning, just solid campaign advice.

Joe Garecht wrote a fantastic blog entry titled “The 3 Keys to Winning Any Local Election” on his Local Victory website.  If you’re thinking about running for local office — from school board to city council to mayor — read this before you do anything else:

(more…)

Colin Delany wrapped up his series, How Candidates Can Use the Internet to Win in 2010, on his fantastic website, e.politics.  (If you missed the first two posts in the series, you can catch up here and here.) In this third and final installment, Colin writes about online voter outreach and the tools of the trade (social networking platforms, blogs, online video, Internet advertising, and turning volunteers loose on behalf of the campaign).

(more…)

Last week I re-posted a blog entry from Colin Delany’s blog, e.politics, on“How Candidates Can Use the Internet to Win 2010″. Today, in Part Two of his article, Delany covers the basic tools  needed for political campaign Internet strategies, from the campaign website to CRM to budgeting and staffing:

(more…)

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:

(more…)

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.)

(more…)

• 

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…

(more…)

• 

What is said about you is oftentimes more important than what you say yourself. So it is crucial to stay on top of the latest mentions of your campaign in the news and elsewhere online. Fortunately, Google has made this a largely pain-free process.

Google Alerts is a free service that allows you to set up news alerts based on specifications you enter. You can select search terms, the type of online media you will search, and the frequency of alerts you will receive–either as news is posted or in a once-daily digest. Below are some tips on getting the most out of this option.
(more…)