Use The Internet To Target Opinion Leaders

Last week I told you about that elected official who wanted me to help him with Internet strategy. Unfortunately he doesn’t have a site adequate enough to implement a strategy. Here’s what I told him about new media and communications strategy:

New media is an interactive way of spreading your message using web activity and the keys to success are simple: update and target opinion leaders.

If your website is updated frequently, people will keep coming back.  Just image if cnn.com, foxnews.com, or drudgereport.com had the same news stories every single time you visited.  Every day, every week…the same old stories.  You would quit visiting the sites and that’s why many political sites fail.

There are a lot of web consultants out there who completely ignore traditional campaign strategies and advise candidates to concentrate fully on the web.  That’s stupid. We like to make fun of those guys because they obviously don’t know what they’re talking about.  Or, they might be trying to take all your money.

We believe that one day every voter will get the majority of their news from the web and maybe one day those guys will be right. But that’s not going to happen in the next few cycles and it certainly isn’t going to happen today. Regular voters still get their political news from the opinion leaders.

We label opinion leaders as those who disseminate information to others. Mainstream media, activists, elected officials, uber-informed voters are all opinion leaders.

New media is important because most opinion leaders get a large chunk of their news from the web. That in turn is disseminated down to regular voters.

It’s called the two-step flow of communication. “The people with most access to media, and having a more literate understanding of media content, explain and diffuse the content to others.” Here’s how it works:

Joe lives in Columbia. He is 63 years olds, votes in every Republican primary, but doesn’t own a computer and wouldn’t know what to do with it if he did.

Bill (our opinion leader) is a reporter for the Associated Press who reads blogs every day. Today he read an interesting story on a SC blog, investigated it a little deeper, and wrote his own story. After posting his story on the wire, it was picked up by WIS and The State newspaper. Joe saw the story on the 11:00 news last night and read about it again in The State this morning. The story was written on a blog, read by a reporter, and disseminated down to the regular voter.

How often does that happen? Every single day. Remember Adam Fogle’s “So Gay” post?

New media is more than just posting press releases on the web. It’s using the latest technology like blogs, videos, and podcasts to get people interacting with your message and wanting to come back for more.

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