Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

I meant to do it last week but I had to clip my nails

Have you ever been reading along in an article and stumbled on something that just didn't seem right? It's unfortunate when little things in a news story aren't right, because you begin to doubt the truth of the whole narrative.

Today's WSJ features a front-page article titled "Behind Dean Surge:A Gang of Bloggers And Webmasters" (unfortunately, you need a subscription). It's an interesting piece that supposedly covers how the Dean campaign got into blogging, etc. I enjoyed reading how Joe Trippi came to manage Dean's campaign, and how his affinity for a particular blog, MyDD, guided hiring and 'grassroots' decision making. Furthermore, the article illustrates part of Dean's appeal - he seems to be adaptable, open, and willing to give up control. Especially relative to his competition. But then this -

The new hire's first assignment: create a campaign blog. That took a week and it wasn't fancy -- readers couldn't directly post comments yet -- but it was the first official campaign blog in presidential election history.

A WEEK? Someone with experience can set up a blog in an hour (yes, with comments). A week? This is really going to hurt with the blogging audience.

Dare I ask - what kind of planning went into this if it took a whole week?

Anyway, here's the context. Another observation I made is that the internet may not be a great place to get paid for things, but it sure seems like a great place to get donations.

BURLINGTON, Vt. -- Two years ago, Joe Trippi was a burned-out Democratic operative who had fled Washington for California. Working as a marketing consultant for dot-coms, he was awed to learn how millions of computer whizzes had designed the Linux operating system through a free-form grass-roots collaboration and taken on Microsoft Corp.'s Windows. He wondered if a political campaign could work the same way.

Today he is managing Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean's campaign and he's stopped wondering. The former Vermont governor is using the Internet to transform political fund raising. About half of the campaign's $25 million take so far was raised over the Web, mostly in small donations -- a funding base the Democratic Party all but abandoned in recent decades.

Mr. Dean's Internet-fueled rise from backbencher to front-runner is a story of desperation, risk and luck. "This thing kind of evolved because of the Internet community, not us," Mr. Dean said in an interview. "The community taught us."

Politicians have been mining cash from cyberspace since 1996, when Bob Dole blurted out an incorrect home-page address while debating Bill Clinton. Despite the goof, the site raked in $200,000 overnight. Two years later, the Internet helped Jesse Ventura fund and promote his bid to become Minnesota's governor. In 2000, John McCain got a two-day, $2 million windfall in Web donations after beating George W. Bush in the New Hampshire primary. Mr. Dean's Internet donations have propelled him way ahead of his rivals; in all, he has collected about $5 million more than the second-place Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, whose fund-raising pace slowed as Mr. Dean's accelerated. Everyone else is $10 million or more behind.

"Jesse Ventura was the hop. John McCain was the skip. And Howard Dean is the quantum leap," says Michael Cornfield of George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet.

During his California exile, Mr. Trippi couldn't completely disengage from Washington and got addicted to political "blogs." Blogs are Web soapboxes where hosts post news and opinions and readers respond, often rapidly. The effect is a never-ending virtual town-hall meeting.

Last fall, Mr. Trippi was lured back East to run the Dean campaign. Mr. Dean had become the party's most outspoken critic of the war with Iraq, and crowds flocked to his events. But by January, the campaign had just $157,000.

"We will never have any money," the governor complained, according to Mr. Trippi.

"We have to use the Internet" to build a base, Mr. Trippi responded.

Mr. Dean understood the concept, but the details escaped him. "What's a blog?" he asked.

At the time, the blog buzz about Mr. Dean was growing, and William Finkel saw a business opportunity. Mr. Finkel, 24, had just joined New York-based Meetup Inc., which sets up gatherings for people with common interests in bars and restaurants that pay fees to have business steered their way. The company, which started last spring and expects soon to turn a profit, had focused on nonpolitical get-togethers, soliciting names of, say, breast-cancer survivors, sorting them by zip code and setting up local "meetups" for them.

On Jan. 10, Meetup initiated gatherings focused on the three Democratic presidential contenders whom Mr. Finkel felt had Internet drawing power: North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, Sen. Kerry and Mr. Dean. Within a day, 150 people had signed up for each of the two senators. More than 400 registered for Mr. Dean.

The response was helped by a Dean devotee in Oregon, Jerome Armstrong, a graduate student who promoted Meetup's Dean invitation on his blog, "MyDD," for "my due diligence." MyDD, as it happened, was one of Mr. Trippi's favorites and he had debated Mr. Armstrong via e-mail about an Internet-based presidential campaign. Mr. Armstrong figured Meetup could help Mr. Dean and urged Mr. Trippi to hire the company. On Jan. 27 he did, bargaining the company's proposed monthly fee down to $2,200 from $10,000. The deal allowed the campaign to sponsor its own meetups and, most important, collect e-mails from anyone who expressed interest.

A couple of weeks later, Melanie Choukas-Bradley, a 51-year-old environmental writer in rural Maryland, bought a $50 ticket for a Dean fund-raiser in Washington, at the suggestion of friends from Vermont. She had been fuming over the impending war and the Democrats' meek opposition to President Bush. The campaign asked for her e-mail address, as it did with every prospective supporter. This would become key to its fund-raising success as the campaign's list of 8,000 addresses grew.

On March 5, the campaign held its first official meetup in New York. The Essex Restaurant was told to prepare for 200 people, but 500 mobbed it, with more in a line outside. Mr. Dean emerged from his taxi and froze. "I was just shocked, stunned," he recalls. "I didn't understand the implications of [the meetups]. Trippi understood it immediately."

The campaign still lacked money or manpower and had only one Internet expert. But virtual-world supporters soon showed up on the campaign's real-world doorstep.

Mathew Gross, a 31-year-old environmental activist living in Moab, Utah, had been praising Mr. Dean on blogs for months. In March, he quit his job serving burritos and flew east to join the Dean campaign -- without calling ahead.

After stopping to buy a $10 tie, he took a cheap motel room in Burlington, near campaign headquarters. On his first day as a volunteer, he stuffed envelopes. That night he stayed up late writing a memo on the importance of blogs. The next morning, he marched toward Mr. Trippi's office to deliver it, pausing at the door just long enough for senior aides to start escorting him away. Mr. Gross threw the memo toward the boss. "I write on MyDD!" he shouted, guessing Mr. Trippi would understand.

Mr. Trippi's head shot up. "You're hired!" he yelled back.

The new hire's first assignment: create a campaign blog. That took a week and it wasn't fancy -- readers couldn't directly post comments yet -- but it was the first official campaign blog in presidential election history.

Like most campaign Web sites, Mr. Dean's had a donation mechanism. Four days before the first financial quarter ended on March 31, the finance team sent a sheepish appeal for money to the 25,000 people now on the campaign's e-mail list. Mr. Trippi was astounded when about $83,000 arrived via the Web on the last day. He wondered if aggressively soliciting money over the Internet could yield more.

Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at October 14, 2003 10:08 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links