Jan 21 2009
New Media vs. Old Farts
Last night after the buzz of Obamapalooza was wearing off, I took part in something called a TwitterBall. The girls at Smart Girl Politics had arranged a “chat room” of sorts to bring together all the conservatives on Twitter. The idea was to have a huge brainstorm about how to rebuild the conservative movement. The cool kids of conservatism - Malkin, Saul Anuzis, SE Cupp among them - hosted various mini-chats to keep the flow of ideas moving.
Though it gave me a magnificent headache (things moved very fast indeed, and I got a little car-sick), there were lessons learned.
- There are a lot of conservatives using new media
- We range in ages from teens into at least 60s
- We are very annoyed at the direction of the GOP
- We are brimming with ideas on how to fix it
In this last epic election, while Obama was sending out text messages to his disciples, unfair but true jokes were being made about McCain’s inability to use a computer. Groups supporting McCain sprung up all over the ‘net during the campaign, but his official team made little or no effort to reach out to them via FaceBook or any other means. The only updates us Twitter addicts ever got was from Palin’s team, and they were all soundbites. Nothing substantial. Not even a “good morning” to show that there was a human somewhere behind the account. Would it have killed whatever intern or volunteer to say something off the cuff? Like “hi”? Well, knowing the McCain campaign, it probably would have. It was one of the most repressed and scripted bores I’ve ever witnessed. It was like Canadian politics, for heaven’s sake!
It seemed the only emails that ever came from Camp McCain were asking for money. Zzzzz…. Delete!
As an aside, this article took over two hours to write, because I was highly distracted by email and Twitter. Social media has it’s upsides and down!
I was so sad I was unable to attend the Twitterball last night. However, I am so excited that we are using social media to network and focus on changes of the party.
I am looking forward to more SPG events.
I will add in one thing here–not only did the McCain team mess up on utilizing new Web 2.0-type of technology, but they couldn’t even get the Web 1.0 technology working right.
Just after seeing the Palin pick, I made my way to the website for my one (and only) political contribution. Along the way, I signed up to volunteer in any way that I could with my local office.
The response? Nothing. Nada, zip, zilch. No e-mail giving me the location of a nearby phone bank, of events coming up (I had to hear about the mega Palin rally here in Northern VA a few weeks later on the news).
Coming down to the home stretch, I went online again and explicitly volunteered my time for the final few days phone banks and other office work. Still nothing (not even a confirmation e-mail from them). Ultimately I had to do a Google search to find a local office, and then just showed up to man the phones. Those working at the office agreed that the online volunteer system had been a total bust, and they had heard from tons of people that they had also tried to volunteer but weren’t given any help.
Obviously there were a lot of missteps made during the campaign, but the inability to make such a basic feature of IT work in this day and age is completely inexcusable. Rather than focusing on how Palin supposedly dragged down the ticket, maybe some of McCain’s people should do some real internal auditing and figure out what really didn’t get done right.