Killer Campaigning

Google Alerts to Track Political Campaign & Election Issues

killercampaigning — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 00:00:30 +0000

If you want to be an effective political campaign candidate, you need to make sure that you stay educated and up-to-date on the many election issues that might affect your district and your constituents.

There was a time when political candidates had to rely on daily newspapers and magazines for staying current on the issues, but the Internet has made it easier than ever before to keep up with local news. I use a free tool called Google Alerts to have instant notifications sent to my email inbox anytime an issue that affects my district gets published online, and you can easily do the same.

Google Alerts takes only a moment to set up, and it’s an extremely useful online tool. To use it, simply go to the Google Alerts interface, then type the keyword phrase that you want to be updated on in the box labeled “search terms.”

One of the first terms that you will want to create a Google Alert for is your own name, since you’ll want to stay informed about any website that publishes information about you or your candidacy. Make sure that you enter your name surrounded by quotation marks–for instance, “Phil Van Treuren,”–so that you are only notified when your entire name is mentioned, and not just part of it.

Next, you have the option of specifying what kind of search results you want to be notified about–news, blogs videos, discussions–but I simply choose “everything” so that I don’t miss any online mentions. You can also choose how frequently you want to be notified of new results (every day if you want) and how many results you would like to see in every email.

The last step is simply to enter the email address where you want the results to be sent, and you’re all set. Every time your specified Google Alert keyword phrase shows up in the search engine’s index, you will be sent a link to the page in the Internet where it appears.

A couple of tips: first, if you have a common name, you want to make sure that you narrow down your search specifications so that you are only notified when it’s sure to be referring to you. A Google Alert for the term “Bob Jones” would probably return hundreds of irrelevant alerts every day. But if you were to set a more specific Google Alert for +”Bob Jones” +”City Council” +”Ohio”, then most of the alerts would probably refer to you personally (putting the “+” symbol in front of phrases means to only return results that include that phrase).

You can set as many Google Alerts as you want, and the service is very reliable. After setting an alert for your own name, you might also want to set alerts for your political opponent’s name; the name of your town or city; and plenty of other keyword phrases that you might want to stay educated on.

Of course, you should still keep an eye on the daily papers to make sure you aren’t missing anything, but Google Alerts makes it much easier for political campaign candidates to stay current on issues that might play a role in their local election.

Squidoo for Political Campaign & Election Websites

killercampaigning — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 01:14:40 +0000

We’ve talked before about how to practice effective search engine optimization to get your political campaign candidate website ranking for local search terms. One of the most important steps in getting your election website indexed by major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing–and getting it to rank for local search terms–is by building links back to your new site.

One of the best free resources for building links back to your political campaign website is called Squidoo. By simply registering for a free account, Squidoo allows you to create unique web pages–or “lenses”–about any topic you want. These lenses also allow you to create links pointing to other external websites.

Squidoo lenses are very easy to set up and publish, but you should put plenty of thought into what the lens will be about and to make sure that it provides factual, useful information about the subject. I suggest that you make your first lense about the city, county or district you are running in.

Take, for example, the Squidoo lens that I recently published about Amherst, Ohio, where I am a city councilman at-large. I made sure that the lens was packed with lots of relevant, factual information about the City of Amherst and its demographics. I also included other easy-to-add Squidoo modules like a guest book and an imported RSS feed of the latest blog posts from my candidate website.

But here’s the most important part of the Squidoo lens when it comes to SEO: the relevant external links. I included several relevant links to Amherst-related websites that visitors might find useful–like the local library and police department–but I also made sure to link back to my political campaign website, as well.

This link back to my website will help it gain more authority in the search engines, and over time it will help my site rank higher for Amherst Ohio related keyword searches.

If you’ve recently launched a political campaign candidate website and want to get it ranking in the search engines for terms that have to do with your candidacy and district, then creating a Squidoo page should be the next thing on your agenda.

Local Election Analysis: Analyzing Political Campaign Results

killercampaigning — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 01:42:01 +0000

While most of what we cover here on Killer Campaigning has to do with the actions you take before election day, today we are going to focus on what good candidates should do after all of the votes have been tallied. Whether you win or lose your local election, analyzing the results of your race can help you run even better political campaigns in the future.

As a former political consultant and current elected official, I start analyzing my local election results as soon as they come in on election night. Here are some of the elements that I look for: which precincts I performed the best in (and the worst); where my opponents got more votes (and where I got more than they did); which precincts had the highest turnout (and which had the lowest).

These are just a few of the things that you can include in your local election analysis–and don’t think that you need to analyze your results as soon as they come in like I do. On election night, especially if it’s the first time you’ve run for office, your focus should be on one thing: whether you are winning or losing.

Once the excitement has died down, though–maybe even a few days or a few weeks after the election–take some time to look at the voting results and see how things played out precinct-by-precinct and ward-by-ward. Did you end up getting a higher percentage of the vote in precincts where you spent more time campaigning? Were there any precincts where you did better than you thought you would? Overall, was turnout higher or lower than you anticipated?

Answering these questions and more will give you a lot of insight when it comes to your strategy for the next campaign–whether you are running for re-election or giving it another shot after coming in short the first time.

The data that you get from running for office the first time–whether you win or lose–is extremely valuable, and will allow you to run an even better local political campaign next time around. Make sure that you don’t skip the local election analysis after all of the votes have been tallied, whether you do it on the same night or a few weeks later.

Local Election Cycles: Best Years to Win a Political Campaign

killercampaigning — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 22:34:50 +0000

There’s an old saying that goes something like this: when you run for office is just as important as how you run for office. It’s a bit of advice that I happen to agree with; some simple historical voting research and analysis of current voter sentiment can give you a better chance at winning a local election by launching your campaign during an election cycle that will be more friendly to your efforts.

Here’s the problem: not everyone who wants to run for local office is willing to wait months or years to kick off a political campaign, and many eager candidates jump into a race without doing any research at all about historic election cycles. Most of these shoot-from-the-hip local candidates go on to lose their political campaign on election day, and are too demoralized to ever run again.

Being wise about which election cycle you put your name on the ballot starts with getting some historical election results and voting data from your county board of elections studying the data. Let’s use, for example, a city council race with a term that is up for re-election every two years. In this case, I would get election results going back about eight years and look at each of the four previous election cycles.

With this data, you’ll be able to identify some important trends: which election cycles are friendliest to first-time candidates (due to low turnout), which election cycles are friendlier to well-known names (due to higher turnout), and which election cycles tend to favor particular political parties.

Several factors could result in specific election cycles having the characteristics I listed above: presidential campaign years, gubernatorial campaign years, and years when there simply isn’t much interest in local elections at all.

With a little bit of research, you should be able to quickly identify which election cycle will be the best year for you to run. You usually won’t have to wait much more that a year or two in order to put your name on the ballot and make your eventual election day victory more likely.

Having said all of that, however, don’t let me discourage you from tossing your hat in the ring immediately if you have a gut feeling that your hard work can overcome the odds. There’s never any time like the presence, but with a bit of patience you could increase your likelihood of winning by a few points.

Teaching Kids to Love Voting, Political Campaigns & Elections

killercampaigning — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 15:21:23 +0000

I just read a really delightful post by blogger Phil James in which he describes how, when he was a child, his father used to take him along to his polling place on election day and let him pull the lever in the voting booth. James says that this helped foster a lifetime love for political campaigns, voting and local elections:

“Not to step on too many clichés here, but I feel there was more than one life lesson learned that day. I asked dad all sorts of questions about the election. I brought my homemade sign to class to rally the support from my peers; got a beat down from my brother after admitting that I voted for Mondale in the mock school election. It led to a brief career in political campaign work after college and an obsession with social justice.”

James illustrates a family tradition that is still important to many parents: teaching children the importance of taking an active interest in politics and our civic duty to vote for the best campaign candidates. By making it a fun family event, James’ father helped ensure that his son would always love the act of voting and pass on the tradition to his own kids.

I’m not sure how many local Board of Elections poll supervisors would allow parents to take their kids into the voting booth, but are there any fun election day traditions that you do with your children?

Mine are great helpers on election day, and last year they helped me wave campaign signs at the polls. We had a blast, and I’m looking forward to involving them in future campaigns as they get older. Even if I weren’t an elected official, though, I would still try to instill the importance of being an educated voter and following through with your civic duty on election day.

Political Campaign Election Cartoons: a Local Newspaper Tradition?

killercampaigning — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 14:54:28 +0000

There are two medium-circulation local newspapers in my suburban Cleveland area, and both offer comparable news coverage and editorials. Only one of them, though, has an on-staff cartoonist who puts a humorous artistic slant on local politics and events, and that’s one of the reasons that I tend to like this paper’s editorial content more than the competition.

I’m a former journalist myself, and I realize that it’s fairly uncommon for a local newspaper to have its own cartoonist on staff and publish cartoons that have to do with local political campaigns, candidates and elections.

The lack of local editorial cartoonists isn’t so much because there aren’t enough people with artistic talent to draw cartoons. The problem is that political campaign cartoons need a special kind of wit, humor and comic subtlety in order to work, and few artists are able to pull it off.

A good political campaign editorial cartoon can poke fun at candidates without resorting to juvenile or crude humor, and is usually funny on many different levels. In fact, I think that artistic talent is the least important talent that a political cartoonist needs to possess. Some of the funniest election cartoons that I’ve seen featured pretty crude drawing skills.

Does your local newspaper have its own political campaign cartoonist who draws caricatures of candidates and election issues? If so, are they effective in their satire or do they miss the mark?

American Majority Activist Training in Rocky River, Ohio

killercampaigning — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 01:31:49 +0000

For Killer Campaigning readers from Ohio (we have quite a few of them), there’s a great Activist Training Seminar being put on by American Majority this coming Saturday, June 12 in Rocky River. You can check out details on the venue location and schedule at this link.

This should be a great training session, regardless of what party you belong to. American Majority is national non-partisan political training group that has trained more than 4,000 individual candidates and activists in the United States this year alone. They have offices in six states and train in dozens of states annually.

Topics at the Rocky River training session will include Grassroots Action, Building Effective Campaign Plans, Utilizing New Media and much more. American Majority will provide full training materials, samples, supplements and other useful materials.

And hey, did I mention that the seminar is being held at Beachcliff Tavern?

Anyone in northeast Ohio who is gearing up to work on political campaigns this year or in coming election seasons should definitely make a point of attending American Majority’s Rocky River Activist Training this Saturday!

Buying Political Campaign Candidate Business Cards

killercampaigning — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 00:39:18 +0000

One of the most often overlooked–and under-utilized–political campaign tools are candidate business cards. When you’re running for office in a local election, you’re bound to meet voters in places that you might not expect to . . . and at times when you don’t have your campaign fliers or other materials on you. That’s when political campaign candidate business cards come in handy.

Many new candidates in local elections think that business cards are only for elected officials, but that’s simply not the case. Buying a couple hundred of simple business cards that include your name, contact information, website address and the office you are running for is good planning, even if you don’t end up using all of them on the campaign trail.

Armed with campaign business cards in your wallet or purse, you should always be on the lookout for potential voters when you’re out and about in your district. Whether it’s at the grocery store, the library or the gas stati0n, don’t be afraid to politely ask people if they are residents of your district. If they are, let them know you are running for office, hand them a business card and tell them you’d appreciate it if they would vote for you.

Keeping political campaign business cards with you is good for more than just handing out to potential voters, though. They’re also good for posting on bulletin boards at local shops and other venues, too. Although this isn’t a great political campaign strategy by itself, posting your card in public places does help build name recognition if done in conjunction with other methods.

Buying business cards for your local election campaign is much cheaper than you might think. In fact, I order all of my business cards from VistaPrint, which actually gives them to you for free if you pay for shipping (extras like glossy sheen cost a few dollars more). You can quickly design the cards yourself on their website, and you’ll have them at your door within a few days.

Triple Your Political Campaign Volunteer Base With Facebook

killercampaigning — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 22:22:47 +0000

By Bruce Dietzen

Volunteers are the lifeblood of your campaign. Unfortunately, there’s no magic formula for tripling the number of supporters willing to knock on doors or make calls. I wish there were.

But there is an easy way to triple the number of people willing to spread the word about your campaign, using Facebook. And that’s what Clayton Lopez discovered in 2009 while running for reelection for City Commissioner, District 6 in Key West, Florida.

Lopez, as popular as he was (and he still is), with a constituency of only 2,616 registered voters, had to get out the vote with a small volunteer team that you could count with one hand. Lopez faced the same challenge that every candidate faces: people are too busy to volunteer. So he tried something new.

At his kick-off event, between singing a few songs (it seems that everyone’s an artist or performer in Key West!), Lopez captured 18 video endorsements from roughly 30 attendees, and posted these on his Facebook page.

Within two and a half weeks, his fanbase grew by 25%. Week over week, media views on his page skyrocketed by 1,613%. And in the five weeks leading up to the election, these 18 video endorsements were shared and viewed a total of 784 times, for an average of 43.55 views per video. So rather than delivering his campaign message to only 30 attendees that day, the 18 people that volunteered their video endorsements helped Clayton get the word out to over 20 times that many people.

So here’s the bottom line. It’s easy to triple the number of supporters willing to volunteer some time to support your campaign in a powerful way. All you have to do is provide them with this simple volunteering activity, which takes less than ten seconds.

And if “tripling” sounds too conservative for you, and you want to capture video endorsements at every event, and in every way possible, look into the new Endorser Facebook application which was developed to handle an unlimited number of video endorsements, as well as videos submitted via smart phones. Endorser also provides supporters with the opportunity to share your official campaign videos and positive news articles as well… which are two additional ways for your supporters to volunteer a few more seconds of their time.

Oh, I almost forgot. Lopez was handily reelected, with 73% of the vote.

Political Campaigns, Local Elections & Strategic Marketing

killercampaigning — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 17:15:13 +0000

Take a minute to go read a really good post on the J.M. Field Marketing Blog today about the similarities between well-run political campaigns and well-run strategic marketing campaigns. They do a great job of showing how successful political candidates can be in campaigning for office if they apply smart marketing techniques to their election effort.

Keeping your campaign message short and focused, identifying what will appeal to your target audience, and strategic timing aren’t just elements of a successful marketing effort for products, but also for political candidates. Here’s a snippet from the post:

Third, and lastly is timing. The difference between salad and garbage is timing. People buy things when they need them, and people’s needs change on a regular basis. It is important to find a means of communication that targets the right customers at the right time. Utilizing all three of these strategies in a marketing campaign will allow you to grow your business.

Voters’ needs change on a regular basis, too. Plenty of political campaign candidates running in local elections for office have doomed their chances at the polls by focusing on issues that the voters couldn’t care less about.