Lobbyists, who lagged while politicians and advertisers tapped the power of the blogosphere, are now actively incorporating blogs into their strategies and are using smaller state campaigns to test which blogs and techniques work best on lawmakers.
Blog campaigns have appeared in Maryland, Virginia and Texas, and there has been much blog-focused lobbying in California, where bloggers were part of the debate over tax proposals.
“It seems to be going state by state,” said David Johnson, CEO and co-founder of Strategic Vision, a public-relations agency with blog expertise. “In New York this year, [the blogosphere] really became a key tool for a lot of the lobbyists.”
In Illinois, lobbyists reached out to blogs in the debate over car insurance, Johnson said, and in Florida, lobbyists posted on blogs to counter arguments to a proposal to ban soft drinks from schools. That campaign, which Johnson helped organize, included information about the taxes generated by drink machines and the suggestion that blog readers contact their lawmakers.
“We were targeting five different senators,” Johnson said. “They averaged about 2,000 phone calls.” Roughly 60 percent of the calls, he said, were in favor of keeping the machines.
Another blog-focused campaign, this one on the national issue of online gambling and Internet poker, triggered 8,000 letters to Capitol Hill in a single day, reported John Pappas and Adam Kovacevich, assistant vice presidents with Washington-based Dittus Communications.
It is exactly that responsiveness that makes blog readers so valuable, Johnson said. Blog readers tend to be better-educated and more politically attuned. They spend 10 to 20 hours a week on blogs, as opposed to the few hours the average person spends reading the news.
“These aren’t people who say, ‘OK — yeah, I might vote; I might call my congressman.’ These are activists,” Johnson said. Lobbyists are also market-testing certain blogs to see which are effective in influencing specific legislators.
“[Lobbyists] are not posting on thousands of different blogs,” Johnson said. “They are doing it on specific blogs. … Then they try to get feedback from the staffs” on who responded and how.
“One thing you have to be careful of, especially if it is a state issue, is making sure that the people who are responding are people in that state.” To do that, lobbyists stick to state and local blogs, he said.
“If you are lobbying a national issue, which we are beginning to see the genesis of, then you want the big national blogs,” he said.
