Campaigning on the blogs Time Magazine has a very interesting article out about a new type of political staffer - the internet outreach specialist:

The embrace of the blogs has helped spawn a new kind a staffer on Capitol Hill: the Internet outreach specialist. In Reid’s office, Ari Rabin-Havt, 27, who worked for Moveon.org and on the Internet team for John Kerry’s presidential campaign, spends his entire day reading blogs, responding to hundreds of e-mails from bloggers and figuring out how to get stories favorable to Senate Democrats onto the blogs. The relationship is helpful for both sides; Rabin-Havt will feed documents on key issues to the bloggers, which they like because it helps them post faster, and the close contact helps politicians head off some negative stories before they surface on the blogs.

Ari was a trainer at the inaugural New Organizing Institute training, helping NOI build the next generation of "internet outreach specialists." The article is a lesson in why having a staffer who understands online organizing is important. For example, take Minority Leader Pelosi's attempt to reach out to the DailyKos community - and how it backfired:

Last month, [Pelosi] went on the liberal blog Daily Kos to tell readers about her resolution calling for congressional investigations into GOP lawmakers' connections with lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The liberal blogs love politicians like Pelosi who are feisty and aggressive, so the visit to Daily Kos, which gets more than 500,000 visitors a day, seemed likely to win her new fans.

But blogs also prefer their guests to engage in conversations. So when Pelosi posted on Daily Kos and then didn’t respond to any of the hundreds of comments users made in response — instead returning to her day job of leading the 201 Democrats in House — one Daily Kos user accused her of "hit and run diaries," while another griped: "Daily Kos is not your personal press release piggybank." The next day, she returned to the blog to try to explain herself. "I don’t have the kind of schedule that allows me to respond to every comment," Pelosi wrote, "but I will a delegate a staffer on my future posts to answer your questions."

This is a great example of what makes New Organizing Institute trainees special. Not only do they have a grasp of the technology behind online outreach, but they know who to reach out to online and how to do it.  ¶ posted by Colin @ 11:21 AM 0 comments links to this post