QUINN STORIES on Twitter

Political consultant and blogger Bridget Dooley praises QUINN STORIES — AboutFace’s video campaign for Pat Quinn’s Illinois gubernatorial bid.

Check out her kind (and astute) words and watch a video to see what all the buzz is about.

“I’m seriously impressed! Humanizing stories and testimonials that illustrate the character, personality, and positions of a politician make a huge difference to voters who otherwise don’t give politics more than 5 minutes a week of their time.

It’s a monumental struggle to capture the electorate’s attention span beyond that 5 minute mark! It requires expert targeting, ingenuity, and a lot of innovative thinking (if your campaign doesn’t plan to spend trillions of dollars on pricey media buys, anyway).

No matter where you stand on the race for Governor of Illinois, it’s hard to deny that David Rosen over at the Quinn Campaign has done a great job on these web videos. Keep up the great work!”

In December we launched “Quinn Stories” with this ‘teaser’ video:

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Ep. 1: AGRICULTURAL DAY. In this first video installment of Quinn Stories Governor Pat Quinn attends the 2009 Illinois State Fair. Follow the Governor as he meets farmers, attends an auction, and talks about the importance of agriculture in his state.

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Ep. 2: THE PRIMARY. In this second episode of “Quinn Stories” Governor Pat Quinn begins his primary campaign with a rousing speech to fellow Democrats, ending with a standing ovation.

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Ep. 3: TORNADO WARNING. In this third video installment of Quinn Stories Governor Pat Quinn attends the 2009 Illinois State Fairs Governors Day. Follow the Governor as he chats with people from all over the state, only to have his visit cut short due to a tornado warning

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Ep. 4: THE GOOD DOCTOR. In this fourth video installment of Quinn Stories celebrated Illinois doctor and social activist Quentin Young welcomes the filmmakers into his home to discuss Governor Pat Quinns integrity and friendship.

A 20 year proponent for healthcare reform, Dr. Young was a founder and served as National Chairman of the Medical Committee for Human Rights, which was formed in June of 1964 to provide medical care for civil rights workers, community activists, and summer volunteers working in Mississippi during Freedom Summer.

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Ep. 5: THE QUINN BOYS. In this, perhaps our most intimate, episode of Quinn Stories, Governor Pat Quinns sons, Patrick and David, share memories of growing up in Chicago. Follow the Quinn boys around town as they talk about a Weezer concert, “Hoop Dreams” and Gov. Quinn as a parent.

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Ep. 6: PIZZA MAN. In this weeks episode of Quinn Stories, we meet John Clark, owner of Reggio’s Pizza in Chicago. In 1982, Pat Quinn helped Clark complete a financing package that helped Reggios become the only African-American owned frozen pizza manufacturing operation in the U.S.

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Ep. 7: GOLD STAR. In this seventh video installment of Quinn Stories the families of fallen heroes discuss Governor Quinn’s dedication to those in the armed services.

Highlighted in this episode are touching and personal conversations with “Gold Star” parents and the signing of the “Line of Duty Benefit” into law by Gov. Quinn.

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Ep. 8: THE CAMPAIGN. It’s crunch time at Governor Pat Quinn’s campaign headquarters and we bring you a front row seat to all the action. In this episode of Quinn Stories we go behind the scenes at the bustling Quinn For Illinois headquarters where volunteers and staff work frantically, side by side, to make sure the Governor wins the primary on Feb. 2nd.

An interview with the “wine guy” and social media genius Gary Vaynerchuk in the New York Times:

Q. What type of business person can benefit from Internet-based promotion?

A. Every type. You just have to be you. Social networking means virtual handshaking, working the room. You connect with people instead of giving presentations. I work countless 18-hour days, answer 1,000 e-mails a day. People feel the authenticity. It’s a very different, very transparent game now.

Q. That sounds like President Obama’s campaign.

A. Exactly. I had thought Hillary would win, but the minute I saw him on social media, I said, “He’s going to win.”

From Jeremiah Owyang… thoughts on Change.Gov .

“I certainly hope the Obama administration applies for next year’s Groundswell awards , they’d be a fantastic case study of how institutions are embracing social technologies to connect with people. It’s really hard for anyone to be a nay-sayers about the adoption of these tools now, if the big ol’ government can start to connect with people, corporations can too.”

From iMedia: Election 2008: What you should have learned

“If you look at candidates as marketers, which they are, and you look at them as media planners, which they are, they’ve just done a phenomenal job of joining the conversation, activating the conversation and using all forms of media at different times to get different messages out,” said Tina Sharkey, chairman and global president of BabyCenter LLC. “The candidates used digital media as a creative means to get their messages across and engage with the audience, and I think that’s a great example for marketers.”

Bush To Obama: “What An Awesome Night For You”.

WASHINGTON — President Bush has called Barack Obama to congratulate him on winning the presidency.

The two-term Republican president told the Illinois senator upon his historic win: “What an awesome night for you, your family and your supporters.

“Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first black president Tuesday night in dominant fashion, besting Republican John McCain.Bush promised Obama a smooth transition to the White House.

Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino said the president told Obama: “You are about to go on one of the great journeys of life. Congratulations and go enjoy yourself”

Snapshot of Presidential Candidate Social Networking Stats: Nov 3, 2008.

Internet Usage in United States

• United States Population: 303,824,646
• Internet Usage: 220,141,969
• Penetration rate: 72.5%
• Growth from 2000-2008: 130.9%
• Stats from Internet WorldStats (Census, Nielson)

Facebook

• Obama: 2,379,102 supporters
• McCain: 620,359 supporters
• Obama has 380% more supporters than McCain
• MySpace
• Obama: Friends: 833,161
• McCain: Friends: 217,811
• Obama has 380% more supporters than McCain

YouTube

• Obama: 1792 videos uploaded since Nov 2006
• Subscribers: 114,559 (uploads about 4 a day)
• Channel Views: 18,413,110
• McCain: 329 videos uploaded since Feb 2007
• (uploads about 2 a day)
• Subscribers: 28,419,
• Channel Views: 2,032,993
• Obama has 403% more subscribers than McCain
• Obama has 905% more viewers than McCain

Twitter

• Obama: @barackobama has 112,474 followers
• McCain: @JohnMcCain (is it real?) 4,603 followers
• Obama has 240 times more followers in Twitter than McCain

From the Boston Globe… Walt Whitman marvels at the tremendous forces of the electoral process, not with adjectives or to justify it with arguments:

“instead, he commends the day by invoking the past. The journeys of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln were powered by this turbulent, often defective energy, says Whitman. We can look back on his observation, over a century ago, and feel encouraged.”

I posted the Wisconsin “targeted” video that the Obama campaign sent out last week to get out the vote.

Here is the one sent out in Virginia:

I know I’ve gone on and on about how much Obama’s people get 2.0, and here is another example we can learn from.  This video and microsite is one of many version of this message V-Blasted out today by the Obama campaign to different cities, with different messages… microtargeted to specific voter populations all around the country.

We often talk about targeting videos based upon the interests of the recipients, not just the “message” of the marketer, and this is a great example.

No matter what your political affiliation, you gotta admit that these guys understand how net video can be effective:

1. Micro-Targeted (narrowcast), not Mass-Targeted (broadcast);
2. Multiple videos with multiple messages to specific audiences;
3. Ease of “viral” functionality and highly portable media (this one is YOUTUBE.  Obama’s site uses Brightcove);
4. A clear “call to action” accompanying the message on the web page (with a “sign up to volunteer” form right next to the player);
5. A simple, clear URL with a MESSAGE not a corporate logo;
6. Easily “snackable” functionality (in this case, YOUTUBE’s default, but still good!);
7. A detailed HTML text field for ease of search engine SEO; and
8. A short video!!!

I would have suggested trimming about 20 seconds to keep it under two minutes, and I wish they linked to the article where the quote is from so you could see the context… as it is it leaves a bit of suspicion in ones mind that the quote is out of context… and I could have done without the Joe Biden cameo at the end (kind of like one of those evening news promos where you know that he did about ninety of them in an hour)… but other than that…

From: The Onion – America’s Finest News Source.

“They already know I’m going to vote for Obama,” Obama added. “The only people who sign up for this thing are Democrats anyway. They’re just preaching to the choir.”

First there was Google Checkout being set up on YOUTUBE for candidate fundraising and now this… a way to index political speeches/text using voice recognition software, for easy discover on Google.

Google’s blog just announced this ‘proof of concept’ step into video text indexing is available now on their political channels:

“Today, the Google speech team (part of Google Research) is launching the Google Elections Video Search gadget, our modest contribution to the electoral process. With the help of our speech recognition technologies, videos from YouTube’s Politicians channels are automatically transcribed from speech to text and indexed.

Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find.”

I keep posting about how Obama’s campaign is leading the way and showing us all how to do fund raising right online. This is a text book example. I received this e-mail today from the Hillary Clinton list:

Let’s forget for a moment that this isn’t a very good e-mail, in that there is TOO MUCH TEXT prior to the call to action. This is a common error of a Hillary campaign e-mail… the idea that the words are more important than the video. But what happens next is worth noting. You are taken to a simple YOUTUBE page:

Note that there is a CONTRIBUTE button right there on YOUTUBE through Google…

And it takes you to a Google Checkout page where you can donate. If you already have a Google checkout account, it simply makes the donation… easy. If not, you get this:

What a great, simple way for clients to raise money online. I wouldn’t be surprised if others have used this before, but this is the first time I’ve noticed Google Checkout on Youtube used for fundraising.

For more on Google Checkout, you can find a video here.

I saw this while watching a piece about campaign finance.

However, the big picture is the whole world knowing about “AboutFace”… or at least those who watch NBC in the morning.

From the Christian Science Monitor, take a look at the Web’s effect on politics: big bucks, big turnout, and big scandals.

“In a year when he continues to break all fundraising records, Obama raked in most of his $265 million from the Internet. The Clinton campaign complained regularly that Obama was outspending it by 2 or 3 to 1 in many states. All that cash came from the Web.

Consider that when Obama raised $32 million in January – a previously unimaginable total – he only raised 12 percent of the money “offline,” according to Patrick Ruffini of TechPresident, a website that tracks how campaigns use technology. That means $28 million came from mostly small online donations.

And Obama wasn’t the only one turning the political world upside down thanks to his fundraising prowess. Maverick Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul was famous for his one-day Internet fundraisers that would regularly haul in $5 million to $6 million from his online supporters.

But in a sense, Obama, Mr. Paul, and anyone else who relies on the Internet to help fuel their campaigns owe a debt of gratitude to two men: Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, who in 2000 was the first political candidate to show that you can use the Web to raise large amounts of money quickly; and former Vermont governor and current Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean, who showed in 2004 that coming from a small state without the mainstream media paying much attention to you wasn’t necessarily a problem if you knew how to work the Internet.

But the Web is more than just an avenue to raise money. It allows politicians to connect with younger voters in ways that 10 years ago were unimaginable. One of the big stories of 2008 has been the 30 million new voters, many under age 30, who have registered to vote.

A new study out this week from the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows that a “record-breaking 46 percent of Americans have used the Internet, e-mail, or cellphone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views, and mobilize others.

The report says that three online activities have been particularly prominent: “First, 35 percent of Americans say they have watched online political videos – a figure that nearly triples the reading the Pew Internet Project got in the 2004 race. Second, 10 percent say they have used social-networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace to gather information or become involved. This is particularly popular with younger voters: Two-thirds of Internet users under the age of 30 have a social-networking profile, and half of these use social-networking sites to get or share information about politics or the campaigns. Third, 6 percent of Americans have made political contributions online, compared with 2 percent who did that during the entire 2004 campaign.”

From Jeremiah Owyang’s blog.

Not sure this rises to the level of debate worthy, but maybe…?

“Although 71% of Americans use the internet (Internet world stats -2007) 70 year old John McCain isn’t unlike other Americans his age, in fact, only 22% of Americans 65 and older use the Internet. (Pew Research -2006)

So does it matter if he, potentially the next President of the United States used the internet?”

The future is looking good!  Checking out this alternate universe on Google News.

From the creator’s blog:

I created my fake Google Google News page in 2007, mostly for my own amusement.  I was depressed about the state of the world and all the dismal headlines, and I wanted to be able to imagine a much better world.

According to the Obama campaign, here is how they are raising their money. Note how the Internet and web 2.0 strategies for fundraising have completely changed the game here, with so much money coming from small contributors.

• New donors in April: 200,000
• 94% of contributions were under $200
• 93% of contributions were $100 or less
• 77% of contributions were $50 or less
• 52% of contributions were $25 or less
• Number of donors to the Obama campaign overall at the end of April: 1.475 million
• Number of contributions given: 2,929,000 million
• Average donation: $91

This was too good to pass up. Chris Mathews finally just can’t take it any more.

Case Study: Howard Brookins for Cook County State’s Attorney.

Challenge: Increase overall awareness and provide a human side to the candidate.

Story: This is the genuine Howard Brookins, his family and his friends.

Political consultant David Rosen, of Chicago’s The Competence Group, is featured in this discussion of the strategy, tactics and usefulness of new media in Alderman Howard Brookins’ race for the Cook County States Attorney’s office. Featuring AboutFace director Casey Suchan.

You can see samples of the original work here>>

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) is jumping in headlong to protect net neutrality…. the ArsTechnica News Desk reports:

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) pledged today to devote “every ounce of my energy to protect network neutrality” and told ISPs to watch out; if they undermine neutrality, they risk losing safe harbor and tax protections.