Why Wikipedia Matters

First off, I hope everyone is enjoying the holiday season. We are just a few days away from Christmas and a week later it is New Year's Day.

Now for the exciting part of today's post: why Wikipedia matters. Wikipedia has become the standard for quickly looking up information. Google will most likely refer you to Wikipedia when performing a search. I was able to play around with Wikipedia recently while helping out Jim Renacci's campaign for the U.S. House race in Ohio's 16th Congressional district. His entry is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Renacci.

On a personal level, I have it say Wikipedia is a lot of fun. You add an entry with some information and a couple days later you find out other people contributed to the entry. It is literally a collaboration project with everyone in the world. I strongly encourage everyone to participate, even if it is on topics not relating to politics.

Before you jump into Wikipedia, you need to be aware of a few rules. First, Wikipedia is not an "encyclopedia of everything." You must prove your topic's importance. Often this can be done by linking the post to other Wikipedia posts. For example, Jim Renacci's was linked to the Columbus Destroyers Arena Football team because he is an owner of the team. However, this is not necessary. State Rep. Ron Amstutz has an entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Amstutz. His entry has been there for years and oddly enough has been simplified to one sentence. Secondly, Wikipedia is not a place to self advertise. This rule is mainly targeted at businesses, but still applies to politicians. The Wikipedia entry needs to come across as non-partisan with facts not opinions. For example, you can say "Mr. X has worked in the health care industry for many years," but not "Mr. X's experience in the health care industry will help us solve the looming health care crisis." There are people who work with Wikipedia who check all of the entries to ensure they do not violate either of those rules. Do not try to trick them. It will not work!

So if Wikipedia's rules are so strict and non-partisan what is the advantage. The truth is, for a campaign, a Wikipedia page is indispensable. As stated above, Google often likes Wikipedia entries. Most likely it will show up on the first page of results. Since it is non-partisan, you shouldn't have to worry about what it says. Furthermore, while the entry is suppose to be neutral and independent, a link to the campaign site is acceptable. In other words, Wikipedia will give your campaign lots of visibility. Furthermore, since search engines (e.g. Google) like Wikipedia so much, having a link to your website from Wikipedia will boost your site's rankings on search engines (good for search engine optimization). It great for rankings and it is a link that is relatively easy to get.

The next post will be January 4th, 2010.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Republicans and New Media

About a month ago the Ohio Erie County GOP Chairman Mathew Old asked be to put together a document with my ideas on how Republicans can leverage new media. My hope is that this document can help campaigns begin to think about new media and ask important questions. Below is the link to the document and the summary.

Republicans and New Media (pdf)

Many will argue that "traditional" media has evolved over time. In many ways, it has. From the written word, to the radio, to the television it seems the dynamic of media is on a continuous and steady march. However, in the past few years there has been a fundamental revolution in media. It is the advent of the Internet. Traditional media is all one way communication; the advertiser has all the power, controlling the information while the public is at the mercy of billboards and commercials. The majority of the public does not have the resources to broadcast their thoughts and opinions to millions of people. With the arrival of the Internet, individuals have just as much power as the advertiser. They can write a post on a blog that will reach just as many people, if not more, than a TV ad. They can tweet and Facebook their friends about their positive or negative opinions. Many organizations fail to understand the multidirectional nature of communication on the Internet. They are stuck in the traditional media mentality and end up annoying customers with spam and failing to address complaints that are instantly shared with millions of fellow users.

Corporations are just now realizing that the Internet has given their consumers more power than their own PR departments. For the most part, political campaigns are even farther behind. The 2008 election gave rise to one political organization that clearly understands and respects the complex and powerful nature of the Internet: the Obama team. Obama’s new media campaign demonstrated that these technologies are relevant but no single organization can control the discussion. To be successful, a candidate must participate in the discussion, not lead it. They must use the opportunity to listen, not shout. They must sincerely engage voters, not spam them. A candidate must genuinely understand the paradigm shift, rather than simply jumping on the band wagon without understanding where the band wagon is going.

Republicans and New Media (pdf)

The next post will be Oct 13th.

Be Seen with SEO

A common theme of this blog is "Have a website that is not just a website." In this post I am going to talk about something that is a little more behind the scenes then usual: SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimization which is techy jargon for having your website be favored by search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, or Bing. Each search engine has an algorithm that is applied to all the sites on the Internet to figure out which sites are relevant to which search terms. When you type in a search term, such as "political campaigns," the search engine will run the algorithm and display the results in the form of a list. The first link in the list is what the search engine considers to be the most relevant. As a website owner you always want your site to be listed first.

Several of the organizations I work with have recently become very interested in SEO and The Ohio State University even sent me for a week long conference and training seminar on the subject. SEO is a multimillion dollar industry. The big problem is that these algorithms are closely held secrets of Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft,
etc. Many organizations will just pick out a few key words to target in their SEO strategy and build those key words into the site. At this point you are probably wondering why such a technical issue should be the concern of campaign in general, after all is that not what you hire a tech guy to do? Well there are several answers to that question.

First, you need to be aware of this issue before you pick a web developer. This goes for smaller campaigns that do not have the funding to hire someone, but still have a website through volunteer work. In any case you need to insure that who ever is doing the site is up to date on SEO issues. Even if you do have a volunteer who may not know much about SEO, the least he or she can do is some research. There are plenty of forums out there where experts discuss SEO tactics.

Secondly, you need to understand certain aspects of SEO if you want the technical part of SEO to work. Your web developer may not be a marketer. At some point before the site is built, decisions have to be made about what type of search terms you think the site needs to be built around. Will it be just your name? Or perhaps your district name? Your intended office title? These are decisions that you, not the developer, need to make. Furthermore, one big factor in these algorithms is links to your site. We do not know how exactly the search engines calculate the weight of a link to your site but we do know it will have a noticeable affect. Again your developer cannot get you links. You will have to encourage other site owners, I recommend starting with bloggers, to include links on their site. This will take personal networking and communication skills, not technical ones.

Finally, it is just plain important even for small campaigns to rank well in search engines. Let me put it this way, if someone were to search for your name on Google would you rather have your site appear first on the list, or some blog post from an individual who is "not" affiliated with your opponent? You should not let your opponent control the debate by having his site or sites listed before yours. Voters will also be happier if they can find the content they are looking for quicker.

Hopefully the trick describe above will not happen to you (but I have worked on enough campaigns to see plenty of "creative" strategies come out of the Democratic machine). The actual technical aspect of coding websites for SEO will probably be left to professionals. However, SEO will not work without a basic understanding and support from the rest of your campaign staff.

The next post will be on July 7th