As lobbyists step up efforts to organize “net-roots” campaigns, they are reaching out to supporters through blogs and even social networking sites such as YouTube and MySpace.
Though blog readers are more politically active and likely to respond to a request for a letter to Congress, success on the blogosphere is far from assured. The field is crammed with more than 54 million blogs, according to search engine Technorati.com, and millions more are coming online every month.
To break through the noise, experts told The Examiner, lobbyists try to partner with like-minded organizations, piggybacking on their established networks through e-mails, Web links or mentions on their blogs.
Finding the right partner requires “aggressive listening,” said Michael Krempasky, who founded the conservative blog Redstate.com and now works for Edelman public relations. You want to determine “who’s talking about what and who moves an issue.”
When the Poker Players Alliance wanted to dissuade Congress from banning Internet poker, for example, its PR firm Dittus Communications contacted avid players to see what blogs they read and then asked those bloggers to read their material, comment and link to their site.
Pat Cleary, senior vice president for communications at the National Association of Manufacturers and lead writer on its blog shopfloor.org, builds his audience by cross-posting content on Redstate.com, a Republican blog where pro-business topics find interested readers. NAM also uses the non-political teaser content on The CoolStuffBeingMade.com — a site showing how items such as buses and saxophones are made — to attract a wider audience including schoolchildren.
Lobbyists will buy online and print ads to promote new blogs, said Michael Silverman of EchoDitto, a public relations firm with many members of the Howard Dean presidential campaign from 2004. “Online ads are more effective because you just click on it.” You can also see almost immediately if the ad is working and change it if it is not.
But the latest technique is to post on sites such as MySpace and YouTube, said David Johnson, CEO and co-founder of Strategic Vision, LLC. You post a video on YouTube then post a message on heavily trafficked blogs with a link to the video, he said.
“People will start hitting it up” and may send the link to others and mention it on their blogs. Even the White House has downloaded anti-drug videos onto the YouTube site in hopes of reaching its young audience.
“YouTube and MySpace — those are the big things,” Johnson said. “They are hitting your activists again and people respond.”
