Three good examples to see how Foursquare can be put to use, both now and in the future, are:

1. The Foreign Office – using Foursquare to give travelling tips at venues around the world.
2. The White House / Barack Obama - using Foursquare to give extra online profile to his activities.
3. The History Channel – raising its profile with historical tips at relevant venues.

Grey. And wanting to pay homage to Barack Obama.

That’s the rather odd impression left from taking a flick through the websites of the Republican contenders to be their party’s 2012 presidential candidate. Grey is the colour of the season, at least on the web. That is an odd choice, you might think, given how many of the candidates are wanting to leave behind the ‘boring grey man’ tag. But it reflects the colour palette which Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign made so popular for political online campaigning. The homage to 2008 extends beyond the choice of grey to include website design and structure — with again many of the sites showing clear similarities (whether deliberately or inadvertently) to those used so successfully by the Obama 2008 campaign.

However, the sameness also extends to functionality and for a broader reason: the range of online technologies used by candidates is now pretty standard, both across parties and in both the U.S. and the UK. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, some geo-lookup for events or groups and the grandfather of them all, email. Add the occasional small bell or whistle and that is pretty much it.

That has big implications for anyone wanting to judge the online success of different campaigns, whether because they are reporting on them, have a professional interest (such as myself, having run the 2001 and 2005 internet general election campaigns for the Liberal Democrats, and now running digital campaigns in the corporate and charity sectors) or are an interested member of the public.

The old days of ‘count the features and say those with the most are the best’ are, thankfully, long gone when it comes to political Internet campaigning. As is common with many technological areas as they mature, after the initial proliferation of features and services, the real success and progress comes with technology that is hidden away behind the scenes — effective management of data, clever analysis of information and so on. During the 2010 UK general election James Crabtree coined the phrase “the unseen technology,” making the point that discussion focuses on the visible whilst the political impact increasingly comes from the invisible.

That turned out to be a prescient prediction, for one of the reasons the Cleggmania surge failed to bring many benefits in marginal seats to the Liberal Democrats was that the party’s backend IT systems were poorly set up to focus dispersed online enthusiasm into concentrated offline vote-winning activity. That is something the Liberal Democrats are now looking to change, by moving over to one of the unseen secrets of Obama’s success, the VAN database system.

In this, the political world is mirroring changes in the commercial world, where the backend data systems of firms as divergent as Tesco and Amazon have been key to their success. Counting widgets on Tesco’s websites or features on Amazon’s offering do not give much of an insight into what is really powering their money-making efforts.

For the outside observer wanting to know how campaigns or companies are faring, that can be frustrating, as the real stories are hidden away from view. But the wise observer knows the limits of what they can see and does not over-analyse the superficial.

Yet at the heart of the Yes campaign in last week’s AV referendum seems to have been a big mistake: trying to run a grassroots campaign to win a national contest.

Grassroots campaigns can pick off parts of a country. Grassroots campaigns can win when there is no national opponent (cf the campaign against the government’s forestry proposals last year – a very effective use of grassroots mobilisation, but not up against a direct opposing campaign). Grassroots campaigns can also raise the funds that fuel national media and advertising campaigns (cf Barack Obama and his mamoth TV advertising spending for the 2008 Presidential contest).

But where a grassroots campaign is up against a national media and advertising campaign against it, grassroots are not enough.

In its own terms, the Yes campaign’s grassroots efforts were very impressive: dominating local media coverage for the much of the campaign with local events and stunts; huge numbers of volunteers brought into the campaign; impressive online donation figures and levels of web traffic that easily beat the No campaign.

There were, inevitably, some mistakes too – especially  in the very small number of different leaflets available which meant that even where there were people willing to regularly deliver an area it was extremely hard to do more than a couple of deliveries – and frequently the idea was that one leaflet would make a difference. (Just as doing only the one leaflet so often results in someone winning a Parliamentary election. Oh, hang on…)

But even without any of those mistakes none of that would have amounted to nearly enough in the face of a national politician speaking out in the national media. The headline polls moved when David Cameron started speaking out as Tory voters shifted heavily to the No camp in response. The No campaign may have run an extremely intensive online get out the vote campaign, but by then it didn’t really matter.

The combination of David Cameron and the Daily Mail is not a sure-fire election winner by any means (see May 2010 for a start), but the answer does not rest with street stalls and tweets in a national contest.

Of course you cannot magic ideal supporters out of thin air, but in the end it mattered far more that so many Labour MPs, peers and councillors did not follow Ed Miliband’s lead, that no Conservative MPs came out unequivocally for a Yes vote and that only the usual suspects amongst media outlets backed a Yes vote (and many of them half-heartedly).

There are many things political parties and campaigners can learn from the grassroots and online efforts of both sides (as Paul Waugh has pointed out) but the most important is a reminder of the limitations of both.

And yet, search his name online and you’ll see a picture of search results significantly outside of his control. News stories pop up near the top most days (meaning, ahem, that his public relations has a much bigger impact on his search results than many details of search engine optimisation work).

His Wikipedia biography – which anyone can contribute to – also comes out high up, as do photos from a myriad of websites, blogs and news outlets.

His own official sites are there too of course – both the White House and the 2012 election campaign ones.

So there are two lessons from this for those outside politics. First, as Obama has done with his Facebook page, a strong presence on social networks can help fill up the first page of search results for you with sources largely under your control. But second, even with all that and with more than one official website, there is plenty of content that Google will throw up driven by the media and the public. Getting your online reputation right means mixing all those different channels into one effective strategy.

Cross-posted from the Engine Group blog.

On past form, many will gloss over the big differences between US and UK politics and the differences between a campaign headed up by the first non-white President and one aiming to make people buy your brand of shirts.

But as the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones, one of the more perceptive commentators on Obama online first time round, has pointed out, the early signs from Obama’s re-election campaign do give hints as to how the internet landscape is looking. In particular, he points out the relative prominence given to Facebook – the social network now where so many people spend so much time both in the US and in the UK.

Far less prominence is given to Twitter, though that may say more about Obama’s track-record of not making particularly good use of Twitter than it does about Twitter’s current potential. It certainly does not have the mass audience of Facebook, but for reaching journalists, opinion formers and potential activists it can do a great job.

Surprisingly, the Obama 2012 Facebook page makes little effort to promote the grand-daddy of online campaign tools – the one that is and forever will be only one year younger than myself and which Obama’s campaign concentrated on last time – namely email. No email sign up form is pushed at the reader.

Less surprisingly, that official Facebook page currently has fewer fans than the unofficial one – continuing a common trend of the unofficial being more popular than the official in online campaigning (something that was particularly notable with the Liberal Democrat online presences in the 2010 general election).

As Rory Cellan-Jones has also pointed out, the early launch of the Obama campaign illustrates how online audiences and teams of active volunteers usually take time to build up – it’s an environment for tortoises, not hares.

In that respect, at least, the Obama campaign is already giving a lesson that has wide applicability.

Even between the event occurring and the publication of a book based on it, Turning Japanese? Britain with a Permanent Party of Government (eds. Helen Margretts and Gareth Smyth), political events in both countries had taken a dramatic turn. In Japan the LDP lost power, starting a period of much greater political fluidity with even subsequent LDP Prime Ministers struggling to restore their party’s previous dominance. Meanwhile in Britain the collapse of the Conservative Party’s economic policies following Britain’s enforced exit from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) quickly made the government appear very vulnerable, even if debates in Labour continued on whether, as John Smith preferred, one more heave was all that was needed or whether, as Tony Blair insisted on after John Smith’s death, a more radical reshaping of the party was required to win the next election.

However, whilst the question of turning Japanese therefore quickly faded from consideration, the book provides a mini-case study in how easy or hard it is to make long-term predictions about the direction of Britain’s political system – a particularly pertinent point given the speculations now about future progressive majorities or centre-right alignments.

The most obvious lesson is how fragile apparently long-term shifts can turn out to be. Just as shortly after its record fourth victory 1992 the Conservative Party plunged into unpopularity that made talk of Conservative hegemony look woefully misplaced, so too those heralding a realignment in American politics epitomised by Barack Obama’s 2008 victory very quickly also looked to be talking about the past rather than the future. By contrast, in Canada the first minority government of Stephen Harper was treated by many Liberals as a small aberration in a tale of Liberal dominance, yet his repeated success at staying in power means that at some point a long period of minority rule starts looking like a more successful change. (That sentence too of course may soon look rather anachronistic depending on the outcome of the election likely due there in the next few months.)

John Curtice’s chapter read now with the advantage of hindsight enhances his reputation, for he accurately picked out how the quartet of Conservative election victories was brittle, for it was not accompanied by a major shift in the ideological views of the public. As Curtice puts it, “It is difficult to argue that the Conservatives have retuned the ideological heartstrings of the British electorate to a more right-wing pitch … The mistake that many commentators have made is to assume that voters simply vote on the basis of issues”. Moreover, as Robert Waller goes on to point out, a long-term tilting of the electoral playing field in the Conservative Party’s favour thanks to the electoral system and demographic and social changes only gave the party an edge – not a guarantee of victory. As the ERM debacle demonstrated, such edges accumulated over decades can be wiped out extremely quickly by political events.

Hence Vernon Bogdanor’s prediction that a formal electoral pact between Labour and the Lib Dems was necessary to give the Conservatives a real chance of defeat at the next election turned out to be wrong. 1997 did not turn out like that at all. So too Will Hutton’s concluding chapter saying that the route back to power for Labour was to become more critical of markets. New Labour did not turn out like that at all either.

The moral from this? As with the predictions from think tanks, sudden events such as the ERM exit and 9/11 can and frequently do completely overshadow the apparently deterministic long-term trends pieced together by pundits seeking to predict the future.

You can buy Turning Japanese? Britain with a Permanent Party of Government (eds. Helen Margretts and Gareth Smyth) from Amazon here (and at a rather cheaper price than some of the other books I’ve recently written about; just 1p in fact).

Addressing the actual causes of inequality should be common ground for the center-left and center-right – and politically appealing to American voters, who are generally more concerned about opportunity than income equality. A mobility agenda might include measures to discourage teen pregnancy; increase the rewards for work; encourage wealth-building and entrepreneurship; reform preschool programs; improve infant and child health; increase teacher quality; and increase high school graduation rates and college attendance among the poor. Children of low-income parents who gain a college degree triple their chance of earning $85,000 a year or more. If America had the same fraction of single-parent families as it had in 1970, the child poverty rate would be about 30 percent lower.

During the initial stage of Republican House control, the focus will be on steep budget cuts. But a successful Republican presidential candidate in 2012 will need to speak of opportunity, not just austerity, to a dispirited nation.

Obama has that chance right now – as well as a progressive model to follow. The leader of Britain’s Liberal Democrats, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, recently addressed the meaning of economic fairness. “Social mobility is what characterizes a fair society,” he said, “rather than a particular level of income equality. Inequalities become injustices when they are fixed; passed on, generation to generation. That’s when societies become closed, stratified and divided. For old progressives, reducing snapshot income inequality is the ultimate goal. For new progressives, reducing the barriers to mobility is.”

You can read the full op-ed piece here.

The piece itself isn’t available to read for free online, but here’s the abstract:

Barack Obama’s double campaign for the democrat nomination and then for the Presidency presented numerous opportunities for improved marketing based on savvy use of technology. Integrating data, using the internet (particularly social media), exploiting text messaging, embracing interactive methods of communication and building on technology already developed for others all combined to give Obama’s campaign a boost. But the key factor was the message and leadership from the top.

UPDATE: It is now available for free online here.

The reality is rather more subtle than the question implies. If you look at internal organisation and communications, the internet has long since become crucial to parties. Even back in 2001 turning off the internet would have caused campaigns to stagger near collapse.

At the local level, the often unsung tool of email has also been putting in years of important service in organising campaigns, mobilising helpers and winning votes. It’s something politicians across the political spectrum are rather better at than even they themselves often give credit for.

After all, Obama’s email campaign may have caught the headlines, but for many MPs and councillors their email lists are a larger proportion of their voting base than Obama’s was.

For the national media air war during the election, the internet – and in particular that tool now used by so many journalists, Twitter – will make this election look very different from previous ones.

That mix of continuity and change means there’s no simple one answer to the question of whether 2010 will be the first internet general election – which may explain why my fuller answer is 4,373 words long, though livened up with five pictures and one film.

Cross-posted from The Engine Blog.

Though the book touches on other aspects of internet campaigning, what makes it stand out from the crowd of competing volumes is its focus on advertising.

It starts with a reminder that there is only one John McCain: the McCain mocked in 2008 for not getting online campaigning is the same McCain who was feted in 2000 for getting online campaigning. Indeed, in many ways it was his 2000 campaign that put online political fundraising on the agenda in the US, just as Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign put online organising on the agenda.

Hence her warning, “Neither of the two main presidential campaigns can be used as a template for the next time round. For one thing, digital media moves way too far. Just think: search advertising was barely a consideration for the ’04 campaigns, and YouTube didn’t even exist!”

It’s not just the US that moves on: what was a successful online constituency campaign for 2001 would have struggled in 2005, and simply trying to repeat 2005 in 2010 will miss the mark. There are some long-lasting principles (such as being online is not the same as campaigning online) and some core technologies that continue to be crucial, particularly email. However, there are also many new and useful options that has arisen.

The growing number of online avenues is reflected in the growth of staff: Bush’s winning 2004 campaign had seven people on its internet team; Obama’s winning 2008 team had 95.

As Kaye rightly points out though, it wasn’t just that Obama had more staff. Barack Obama was a special candidate who generated huge enthusiasm and support – vital fuel for his successful use of the internet. That gave him one edge over McCain online. Another edge was that McCain was stuck in the 2000 model, seeing the internet as little more than an online ATM to be plundered for funds. Obama’s campaign by contrast took Dean’s innovations in building communities and recruiting volunteers and evolved them one step further.

As a result, Obama’s online advertising had a near ubiquitous “Join Us” message, trying to build online communities and email lists which were then heavily mined for donations but also regularly encouraged to take part in campaign activities.

Overwhelmingly both the McCain and Obama online advertisements were about building the organisation – raising money, acquiring email addresses and so on – rather than about persuading voters. There were some voter registration and get out the vote adverts, but these were the exceptions.

Google was the manor beneficiary of these advertising campaigns with 45% of Obama’s online ad spending – and more of McCain’s – going on Google ads. They were often geographically targeted, sometimes to quite fine levels:

Just when it seemed to one media executive assisting in the [Obama] local ad buys that the campaign had satisfied their primary state targeting needs, a cryptic e-mail subject line appeared in his inbox:

“Guam?”

Another form of targeting was much less talked: micro-targeting by matching up data from different sources:

“These are the kind of things that I think smart people would keep to themselves,” one interactive political consultant said, alluding to the privacy concerns associated with tapping information like voter history and party affiliation for targeting ads…

Savvy customers are accustomed to advertisers combining information from various sources to better tailor offers to them. However, when advertisers attach data on their shopping habits with info on which party’s primaries they’ve voted in, the dander goes up.

A campaign consultant discussed a 2004 Republican organization that matched voter file data against AOL and Yahoo databases to target ads. The organization provided the vote file information, and the third party data firm ran a match against the registration info and refined the list based on additional criteria such as party affiliation. Then, in the last few days before the election, when those particular users showed up on AOL or Yahoo, they may have been served an ad with a GOTV message.

Although online advertising took place on an unprecedented scale in the 2008 election, the funds allocated to it were still only 6% of those allocated to TV advertising. Kaye suggests part of the reason for the continued dominance of TV advertisements is the financial structure of political consultancy in the US, where consultants came make a commission on TV adverts run by their campaign but not out of online adverts.

Obama’s campaign was so flush with cash that even just 6% was still a large number. It meant advertising extended into such novel areas as appearing within computer games. Unlike McCain’s campaign, the Obama team ran numerous adverts on social networks, a key and often over-looked part of explaining Obama’s success on them. Perhaps the oddest adverts to UK ears would have been those run on the equivalent of 118 118 and other services, where some lucky people heard Obama adverts before being told the phone number for a local plumber.

Despite the Obama campaigning sprawling over so many different outlets, it kept a very integrated approach with online rated right from the top:  “It’s important to stress that McCain’s Web people were savvy in their own right. But they were hampered because they weren’t part of the inner circle. Obama’s Web team, meanwhile, got to sit at the big kids’ table.”

As Dan Solomon puts it in the foreword, “Despite the wiz bang of new gadgets and digital platforms, communications is still a human endeavour. And like all human endeavours, cooperation and initiative make a difference in the outcome”.

The book provides a detailed narrative account of the online advertising campaigns through the primaries, caucuses and general election. It is heavier on description than on analysis, but it poses the right questions for analysis even if not much space is given to considering the possible answers.

Don’t be deceived by the amateurish edge to the typography, slightly repetitive text in places, casual language (such as “info” for “information”) and smattering of typos – this is a book that is packed with useful detail, marshalled with the benefits of years of internet experience. It ends on a particularly practical note, with an Afterword that draws out the lessons from the book for those running for election, but not for President.

Although the book is not available in the UK, you can use Amazon.com to buy Campaign ’08: A Turning Point For Digital Media