On Monday, Jessica posted her “Ten Twitter Tips for Campaigns in 2010″; to continue the theme, today I’ve linked up an article from the United Kingdom on “How the 2010 Election Will be Won by Blogs and Tweets”, appearing earlier this month in The Guardian:

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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.)

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.

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!

In the spirit of Abby’s “Social Networking 101” tutorial from last week, here are 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!

Today’s tip is a two-for-one special involving GOTV (Get Out the Vote) strategy and the popular social networking site Twitter:

1. Every campaign should dispatch volunteer poll watchers to as many voting locations as possible (especially strategic ones). The poll watcher should note how long the lines are, writing down the names of voters and reporting back to campaign headquarters throughout Election Day. Campaign HQ monitors the reports from the poll watchers to see if turnout is high or low in the various precincts, checking off supporters’ names in the campaign database along the way. In this way, the GOTV operations director (whether he or she is the official campaign manager or someone else) has a 30,000 foot view of Election Day turnout and knows when and where to dispatch other volunteers helping with GOTV efforts. The traditional way of doing this is by phone at regular intervals during the day: morning, mid-day, and afternoon reports. This is where Part 2 of the tip comes in…

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Thanks to the 2008 election, “social networking” is the buzzword of political campaigns today. Consider this your crash course on getting started, doing it right, and—eventually—reaping the rewards for your campaign.

Lesson #1: Specialize. It makes sense in economics and it makes sense in politics. Aside from the major social networks, there are a rapidly growing number of niche networks. You cannot be part of them all and, if you were, you would never have time to keep up with all of your profiles. So, unless you are running a statewide race, pick two or three social networks and do them well. “Doing them well” means that you should fill out your profile completely, log in and participate daily, and always, always, always respond to your supporters and reach out to new ones. If you aren’t sure which to select, Facebook and Twitter will give you a sound foundation.

Lesson #2: Do it yourself. You wouldn’t send a stand-in to give a speech, so don’t use a proxy to be you online. A social networking profile is your chance to create a personal connection with another person using the internet. But you cannot make a personal connection if it’s your staff or a volunteer doing the connecting. So make a commitment to spend at least 15 minutes each day logging into your social networking profiles. People will notice the difference, and the advantage to your campaign will grow as a result. If you don’t believe me, compare the Twitter profiles of Marco Rubio, a Republican who manages his own profile, and Arlen Specter, whose profile is manned by his staff.

Lesson #3: Be genuine. The temptation to use your social networking profile as a soapbox is nearly irresistible. But you must behave online as you would at a neighborhood party. You would share interesting information about yourself, but you wouldn’t monopolize the conversation. You might ask a friend (or, as a politician, a supporter) for a favor, but you would do so graciously, and you would listen to feedback when it was offered to you. Participating in a social network is your chance to have a one-on-one interaction with a supporter—many times over. So be genuine, affable, and interested in other people, just like you would away from the computer.

Lesson #4: Connect your social network profiles to your campaign. Your social networking profile should drive supporters to your campaign site, and your campaign site should drive supporters to your social networking profile. So connect the two pieces of your online campaign, so visitors can find you in both places.

Lesson #5: Use your social network communities. Generating a mass of followers on Twitter or a slew of friends on Facebook may look great on paper, but it’s useless on Election Day if you cannot mobilize these people to work on your behalf. So set goals for your communities on different social networks, and see how they respond. You may ask Twitter followers to pass on a link to an important news story or Facebook supporters to “donate” their profile picture to display your campaign sign. But asking people to take easy, in-network action before Election Day will help you identify the most motivated supporters, who will be your go-to group for GOTV efforts.