Doing Digital for Romney: An Interview with Zac Moffatt - Nancy Scola - Politics. Meet the man who is poised to fight the digital war against the Obama reelection machine. What exactly do you spend your days thinking about when you're a digital director of a presidential campaign that's on track to win the Republican nomination? Zac Moffatt, 32, leads the digital side of the Mitt Romney campaign. He moved up to Boston last spring with his wife after some years in Virginia and jobs throughout Republican politics, including work on Bush-Cheney '04, with the Republican National Committee, and a variety of high and low profile races with his firm, Targeted Victory.
We talked recently about the shortcomings of judging digital by the same sort of raw metrics we apply to, say fundraising (see, the Washington Post's @MentionMachine ), about how much of tech politics is happening behind the scenes, and about what digital success looks like. Romney '12 started from scratch, says Moffatt. "That infographic that they did for their millionth donor?
Republican National Convention Aims To Be ‘The Most Tech-Savvy’ In Party’s History. Republican National Convention organizers have big plans to show they're on the forefront of technology, too, from live-streaming speeches to finding new ways to use Xbox tools. Shortly after announcing that Google would be the official Social Platform for the Tampa, Fla., event from Aug. 27-30, convention planners said Microsoft would be its official Innovation Provider for the third election in a row, setting an ambitious goal of the most tech-savvy convention in our party's history.
We're taking the convention beyond Tampa, communications director James Davis said in a phone interview, so people can have a front-row seat. By being an Innovation Provider, Microsoft will be providing tools -- like Skype, Kinect, Web application SharePoint -- and consulting services to convention organizers and participants in the planning and execution of the Republican National Convention.
They've secured the tools, but organizers are still figuring out what they can do with it. Republicans Launch Facebook App to Defeat President Obama. When it comes to social media, the oft-heard narrative of the 2012 election season is that the Democrats are the "social party," and are more adept at using platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. The Republicans, however, are trying to turn that logic on its head.
The Grand Old Party opened up a new media salvo with Tuesday's launch of its "Social Victory Center," billed as a one-stop-online-shop for Republican voters to organize, plan events and volunteer in local, state and national elections. And it's all baked directly into a Facebook app, allowing the GOP to capitalize on the relationships that users on the social network have already built with one another. "With the Social Victory Center, we are revolutionizing the way activists and volunteers participate in Republican campaigns," said RNC Chairman Reince Priebus in a statement. "We're breaking down geographic borders and connecting users to a nationwide grassroots network and a wealth of political resources. "
Google tapped for Tampa convention. The Presidential Race on Facebook: Will Their Fans Take Them To The White House? The Growing Reach of Social Media’s Election Impact. The 2012 tech primary - Kim Hart. As GOP presidential contenders stump for votes from Iowa to New Hampshire to South Carolina, Google, Facebook and Twitter are in a race of their own — for millions of dollars in political ads. The tech giants are offering candidates new ways to advertise — Mitt Romney has spots on YouTube and Rick Perry’s Facebook ads target Christian college kids in South Carolina — and hiring political consultants, sponsoring debates and poaching from each other’s ad sales teams to jockey for the top spot in political social media circles.
Continue Reading “This is the Twitter election,” boasted Peter Greenberger, who Twitter recently lured away from Google, where he started the search giant’s political ad sales team in 2007. “We’ll be a core component.” Not so fast, says Google, the most experienced Web company when it comes to political advertising. In 2008 and 2010, candidates largely used Google ads to fundraise. Targeted Web ads: The next frontier - Ben Smith and Emily Schultheis. If you’re a Republican primary voter living within 100 miles of Ames, Iowa, there’s a pretty good chance that Michele Bachmann spent the summer talking to you out of your computer. But only if you’re a Republican primary voter. Continue Reading While Democratic or independent Iowans saw ads for cellphones or toothpaste as they loaded up local news clips, television shows on Hulu or college football highlights, likely caucus-goers got 15 or 30 seconds of Bachmann talking about her Waterloo heritage.
On YouTube, ads can be targeted based on either category — news, politics, entertainment — or geography, by city or ZIP code. But Bachmann’s campaign says it was able to target much more narrowly, cross-referencing Internet user data, gathered by programs called “cookies, with voter files that have long directed mail, phone, and door-knocking efforts.” Where Obama, Romney Draw Web Fans - Washington Wire. Is Mitt Romney Buying Twitter Followers? I’m not saying he bought them, but Romney’s follower stats have taken a sharp and sudden rise since Friday 5PM EST. Could it be a weekend blitz? Twitter noticed. Personally, I think this is too obvious for the Romney campaign to have done.
It’s more likely somebody is trying to plant a story to embarrass him. The question then is: who controls 100,000+ Twitter accounts like this? Time will tell. Data Last Updated July 23, 1:20PM EST Romney was gaining around 3000-4000 new followers per day for the past month. The red and orange lines are Romney’s mentions and retweets each hour, so you can see no corresponding increase in other metrics. Mitt Romney’s VP Pick Will Be Announced Via iPhone App. If you asked 100 people the question “Which Presidential candidate is more tech-savvy,” I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find 5 that said Mitt Romney.
After his strong use of social media and internet donations back in 2008, President Obama received the reputation of being the guy whose campaign would best leverage technology. When it comes to social media specifically, it’s not even close. Not only does Obama have more than nine times the Facebook likes, but he also has nearly double the Facebook users talking about him and a wide lead in “viral reach.” Mitt Romney’s yet to crack 1 million Twitter followers, and the President currently sits at 18+ million. Obama also just unveiled a new iPhone app called Obama for America that pushes breaking news, as well as campaign event information and volunteering opportunities. But hold up, says the Romney campaign. It has the clever title of Mitt’s VP, and is free in iTunes and Google Play.
So, who will it be? Romney: The Underground Economy of Buying Twitter Followers: Dealers, Abusers & Fake Accounts. Why Obama's Web Traffic Is Good for Romney. Share Mitt Romney is not exactly big on the Internet. After months on the trail, he lags far behind Barack Obama as both a candidate and a topic. Obama nets more supporters and dollars through his online campaign, and draws more traffic in news and search—one of the rawest indicators of what Americans are looking for online. But is that even a good thing? Buzzfeed, a popular online bulletin board that dived into politics this year, recently touched on the online disparity with, naturally, an eye-catching headline. “Mitt Romney Is Terrible for Traffic,” the site declared, its horror duly noted.
The article surveyed bloggers and web writers who have learned that “no one wants to read about Mitt Romney.” Presidents do make a lot more news than challengers, however, so it could be unfair to credit Obama for his built-in audience. The Obama piece didn’t just win, its audience was five times bigger. “The Obama-centric posts vastly outperformed those about Romney,” BuzzFeed reported. Web performance and the 2012 US election: Is site speed an early indicator of future success? According to this Mashable post, Barack Obama and each of the Republican candidates’ all claim to be pretty pro-technology, with strong anti-SOPA and anti-PIPA stances.
I wanted to see if this pro-tech stance extends to web performance, so I decided to take a shallow dive into their websites and mobile strategies. I was actually kind of surprised to see some interesting patterns emerge. 1. Website speed correlates (mostly) to position in the primaries. When you stack these numbers side by side, you see a rough relationship between site speed and recent primary results. 2.
At recent Velocity conferences and elsewhere online, I’ve emphasized that one-third of mobile users want to access a site’s full content, not just a stripped-down “mobile” version. Given how tech-savvy President Obama’s people were throughout his first campaign, it’s not surprising to see that, with his new campaign site, they’ve adopted responsive design principles. 3. 4. Related posts: