This story is more about the Conservative movement trying to build it's online presence. But I just couldn't wait to get my "first Twitter jab of the year" in.
Anyway, from Ars Technica's article entitled "Reinventing conservatism, one tweet at a time"...
Since the humbling results of the November election came in, the conservative movement has been scrambling to assess what happened—and to figure out how to prevent it from happening again. Much of this effort, in light of the Obama campaign's much ballyhooed online operation, has focused on closing the technology gap with the left, and getting conservative candidates and activists to make better use of new media. Hence we see sites like Top Conservatives on Twitter, meant to publicize co-partisans on the popular microblogging service and encourage others to sign up.
The most prominent of the restructuring efforts, though, is Rebuild the Party, brainchild of a group of Republican online strategists who are pushing the idea that adapting to the Internet must be the GOP's top priority over the next four years. They're proposing an ambitious goal of recruiting 5 million new online activists and insisting on a new openness that better integrates distributed grassroots efforts. In the past week, RedState founder Erick Erickson has laid out some more detailed advice to his fellow conservatives—heartily seconded by The Next Right's Patrick Ruffini.
I find this happens a lot in life. People get so set in their ways that they can't imagine anyone would disagree with them. Then, when it becomes clear that people do disagree with them, they can't accept it. They cling to their beliefs and assume people simply aren't hearing them despite every bit of reasonable evidence.
That's modern day Conservatism.
I'm not arguing against the Conservative movement beefing up their online presence. The web is the best thing to happen to campaigning since political parties were established. It's superiority in both finding supporters and then keeping them all in sync is unquestionable. But it's not the cure for what ails the Conservatives and it certainly won't win an election.
To demonstrate that let's talk about the "Obama campaign's much ballyhooed online operation" for a moment. It supposedly made all the difference. But a quick look at compete.com shows barackobama.com had, at it's peak, about 8.5 million visitors. For those keeping track that's about 12% of the people who voted for him. More importantly, Barack Obama won by about 9.5 million votes meaning even if every one of those visitors was an undecided voter (very, very unlikely) it still wouldn't have made the difference.
But what about all those liberal blogs?
The Huffington Post is pretty much universally considered the largest liberal blogging site and they got about 5.5 million visitors during the election season. So all the above applies even more so.
For contrast let's take a look at TV. There were three Presidential debates between the two candidates. The first was watched by 52.4 million viewers. The second, 63.2 million. The third, a major disappointment at only 56.5 million viewers (a baseball game was on the other channel).
So the bottom line is this: On-Line efforts are great but they account for a relatively small number of people. The Conservative message (such as it was) got out. It was just rejected. No amount of online activity would have changed that.
So what are conservatives to do?
Stop looking to a method of communication as the solutions for a bad message. Political campaigns should try to use every means of mass communication to get their message out and that's exactly why I have no problem with conservatives trying to grow their online audience. But an online presence is worthless without a compelling message. So building an online presence isn't going to do them a whole lot of good right now.
What they need to do is reevaluate their priorities so they have a message that is compelling to the American people. Only after they've done that will an online presence be any good to them.