Planting Liberally

Everyone knows that social networking and other new media (like text messaging) is important to reaching young voters. Everyone knows that campaigns should use those new media. But how? The New Politics Institute New Tools Campaign has a great set of resources which help campaigns navigate the waters, but it just barely touches the topic of the new web. It doesn't address social networking, for example. Mike Connery posted an interesting diary at MyDD (and DailyKos, and his own Future Majority) called A Young Voter's Response to the Democratic Strategist. The diary covers Democratic outreach to young voters generally, but it addresses the topic of reaching them through social networking and offers the following suggestion:

Pony up the resources to hire some (young) new media staffers and make sure you are using all new media to reach out to specific constituencies who most use that particular media.

The notion is that a campaign will hire a blogger, a social networker, a text messager, etc. In the comments, Mike and I have a bit of a back and forth about how a campaign should hire social networkers. The main point I'd like to make in all of this is that social networking and new media generally present enterprising liberals with a lucrative entrepreneurship opportunity. Social networking is a big headache for campaigns; they have to "know" how to use each of dozens of different sites, they have to understand the difference between social networking and video and photo-sharing and text messaging and all the rest of it; they have to understand the rules of etiquette in each of these various media outlets. Or, they have to hire someone who knows all of this stuff, and how are they supposed to know that the person they hire is qualified? Cue the social networking consultant, someone who hires many different new media "evangelists" and who can be hired by the campaign to reach out to a variety of new media, and plan a new media strategy for the campaign. Such a consultant can keep up to date with the various trends in the field and can give the candidate advice on how to reach his or her chosen demographic. Consultants might or might not be the right solution for a presidential campaign, but they almost certainly make sense for a statewide or citywide campaign (within a large city). They can be as valuable, or more valuable, then a broadcast media consultant. It's a fairly simple idea. It also illustrates a point I'll make again in more elaborate fashion soon. There are many different revenue streams available to liberal entrepreneurs. Today I'm talking about campaigns as a potential revenue stream; on Friday I mentioned ads and merch (implicitly, since that's what drives most new blogs); and on Thursday I mentioned (also implicitly) progressive businesses. I'll go into more detail in a couple of days, but for now - there's gold in them thar hills.